Only I know that's not true. It can't be true, because there are no political debates on nationwide television in this country. Not real ones. There is no place in the national discourse for issues of real substance to be debated. The whole purpose of televised "debates", and of mainstream political discourse more broadly, is to establish the limits of acceptable topics of discussion; to decree, by the very act of posing the questions, what may be questioned and what may not.

So no, there wasn't a debate last night. There were two Total Statists standing on a stage (I don't know - did they stand?) disputing the finer points of how best to wield Total State power over the lives of everyone else. Will we deport all Muslims from our country and build a wall to keep them out? Or simply continue bombing them in their own countries? Will we continue to extort money from the Citizens in order to finance our wars of aggression all over the world? Or will we extort money to build a high-speed coast-to-coast monorail that only stops at national monuments and runs on cheese fumes?