UPDATE: Still Not Watching the Debates, and Vindicated

A while back, I wrote a bit about why I'm not watching the Republican debates right now (though I may once we get closer to primary season) and since there's one going on right now, the detritus of which I am currently wading through on my tumblr dashboard, I do find myself with one more comment on the debates.

I was totally right to ignore them and neener neener.

Even though it's late and I'm tired, I DO actually have a more coherent comment (though I am a fan of elementary school level insults).  The main thing I want to note is that the coverage of the debates and the candidates has swung around so much that I feel I was correct in my assessment of the debates as largely unrevealing of the candidates' respective strengths.  The first debate was in May, and at that time everyone was peeing their pants over Michele Bachmann, who was unceremoniously dumped from frontrunner status for Rick Perry, who is of course now taking a back seat, buzz-wise, to Herman Cain.  This is all in a swing of just about five months, and of course leaves out the spectres of Romney and Paul, both of whom sit in a weird kind of popularity netherworld in this field.  It seems to me that the media is too busy jumping all the guns they can find to tell anyone anything about the candidates, and that is the whole point of a debate, particularly in this kind of pre-primary setting.  We should be hearing from the candidates about what sets them apart, and I do not get the sense any of that is coalescing, with the exception of Herman Cain's (utterly ridiculous and illogical) 9-9-9 tax plan, which I suspect is WHY he's currently so popular...he's the only one throwing out something concrete.

If you'd like some interesting thoughts on the Romney Issue as an alternative to my told-you-so-ing, Christopher Bird has a great little piece on the GOP's weird relationship with Romney that I think lays things out well.  It's worth a read and is certainly thought provoking, and Bird's site in general is top notch.  Give it a read!