As the American presidential campaign winds down, the people of the United States have given their opinions to a plethora of polling organizations as to who “won” the various debates.

The debates are fascinating features of the contemporary election campaign, in that they are hyped beyond belief (especially by the networks carrying them) as having the potential to change the very course of a campaign, and in effect, choose the winner well before Election Day.

They also provide endless hours of paid employment for those in the journalistic fraternity known as “pundits.” These are the men and women judged by someone, somewhere, to know more about politics than anybody else. So before these “events” they are called in to speculate on who must do what and say what in order to “win” the debate.

Then after the event, they are called back to explain who “won” and why.

They are not to be taken too seriously either before or after the event.

In the first place, they tend to intellectualize, rationalize, analyze, and then pontificate from a purely intellectual perspective. Which is not how people watch these debates on television. In fact, they watch them from an emotional perspective.

Which simply means that it ain’t so much what you say, as the way that you say it.

Which is why, way back at the first of these election events, when John F. Kennedy did battle with Richard Nixon, radio listeners thought Nixon had bested Kennedy, while television viewers gave it to John F. by a wide margin.

That hasn’t changed, because human nature hasn’t changed.

A television election debate is a verbal boxing match. The winner is the one who gets more people to like him after the match is over, because very few people can remember 90 minutes worth of what either of the combatants has said anyway.

So the short, sharp riposte is remembered (“wrong war, wrong time, wrong place”) while the convoluted, intellectually sound explanation simply dulls the senses.

Television is the medium of the emotions. It is not a medium for serious thought or reflection. It is the medium we watch to be entertained

And that is why the worst thing that happened to George W. Bush in the debates, happened after the debates. It was the editing job pasting together his frowns, blinks, head shakes and whathaveyou into one of the funniest pieces of election tape I have ever seen. It is very entertaining.

In that tape, Bush ridicules himself — and when we laugh, we laugh at him, not with him.

Bush shrinks in size. The power he represents is diminished. The leadership qualities he tries to portray are absent.

In that tape, if for no other reason, George Bush lost the debates — and may very well have lost the presidency.

Senator John Kerry, the Democratic candidate, was seen to be the winner by most opinion polls, and so was his running mate, Senator John Edwards. With an opponent like Dick Cheney playing the role of a grouchy old avuncular badger, Edwards can’t help but come off looking good by comparison.

Deadlier than the debates

“Osama bin Laden — of course I knew it was Osama bin Laden.” — President George Bush

Which raises the question asked by John Kerry and a few million American citizens: If you knew it was Osama bin Laden, why did you go after Saddam Hussein instead ?

It is the seminal question of this campaign: Why did the President order up an invasion if it was not Saddam Hussein who attacked the homeland on that sunny September morning?

According to Bush and his personal pit bull, Dick Cheney, it was the presence of weapons of mass destruction and Saddamâe(TM)s connections to Osama bin Laden that justified the carnage that has ensued, with the resulting deaths of uncounted Iraqi civilians, thousands more “terrorists” and over 1,000 American service personnel along with close to 8,000 wounded.

And now, with the American political leaders still protesting that the war was justified, comes the final exposé of the campaign of misinformation and outright lying that propelled the Americans into the quagmire of an unwinnable war.

It is not so much that any new facts have emerged to pin the President and his helper in a prism of truth; it is the source of the latest gathering of those facts into a cogent reportage — from an enquiry into the truth of the circumstances commissioned by the President himself.

It is tantamount to a barrel of gasoline thrown into the tinderbox of the final days of the American election.

The President’s commission discovered no weapons. Not only that, it discovered that there had been no WMDs, nor any capacity to produce them, after 1996. That’s seven years before the commander-in-chief ordered up his personal invasion.

The current excuse offered by Bush-Cheney and their spinners, is that Saddam could have supplied WMDs to unnamed terrorist groups along with Osamas’s boys. Turns out that wasn’t even possible. Saddam had no WMDs of any kind to give them, nor was there any semblance of a nuclear arms production facility from which could supply terrorist groups.

It was all a fantasy of fear. A con job perpetrated on the American public with the eager assistance of the American media.

The New York Times summed it up this way : “….nothing in the voluminous (1000 plus pages) record provides Mr. Bush with the justification he wanted for a preventive war — because the (Saddam) weapons programs did not exist.”