The Peril of Valuing Style Over Substance

Charles P. Pierce on how a low-information, "undecided voter's" view of the VP debate might turn on the wrong "style points", and the consequences of that writ large:

"If you believe that Thursday night's vice-presidential debate was a 'draw' because Joe Biden was 'rude' and 'disrespectful' while Paul Ryan was obviously being disingenuous and uninformed, or that you've decided to go with 'disingenuous' and 'uninformed' because its manners made it more 'likable' then you deserve the inadequate health-care voucher that's coming your way in 2014, as well as the letter from the Social Security Administration that your benefits will be down to 85 cents a month because International Embezzlement LLC went belly-up and took your retirement with it. Tough luck, kids. Them's the risks of an Opportunity Society."

In this, the New Confederate/Rethuglican party has an accomplice, as Pierce and Matt Taibbi (below) point out -- the superficial, "both-sides-do-it" media that focuses on the atmospherics to keep people reading and tuning in and for fear of offending the crackpot Rethug base's well-incubated pathologies and paranoia.