I’ve got great news for all you primary debate fans! Go on. Read the press release:

Today, Barack Obama accepted invitations to nationally televised debates with Senator Hillary Clinton in Philadelphia on April 16th and in North Carolina on April 19th.

The Pennsylvania debate will be hosted by ABC News and held in the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia on Wednesday, April 16. The North Carolina debate, hosted by CBS News at a location to be determined, will be hosted by CBS and moderated by Katie Couric and Bob Schieffer.

Eh. Really? What else is there to talk about? Haven’t we covered EVERYTHING, at length, of interest to anybody anywhere? We have even gotten to the point where actual professional reporters and highly educated experts are reduced to talking about whether or not “denouncing” is the same as “rejecting”. What will these debates BE exactly? Probably another opportunity for the candidates to try to score tiny, largely meaningless points off of each other. Unless one candidate drops and F bomb or says something crazy about the Illuminati being responsible for 9-11, it will serve only as cable news fodder for two days, and fuel for a couple of cheap shots. I’ll pass.

This is all getting very tiring. How long are we supposed to humor Hillary Clinton before someone has to finally tell her that she has lost this election?

It’s like the old cold war military doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction. This is the idea that full scale nuclear war between two very powerful countries would likely result in the total destruction of both parties, as well as most of the planet. This fact is supposed to deter competing nuclear countries from using such weapons because they would at that point become objectively ineffective. Nobody wins if everybody is dead. Simple.

The only reason, given the harsh deterrent, that anyone would go ahead and WAGE such an obviously disastrous war, would be not to WIN a conflict, but to prevent anyone else from winning. It’s not victory, it’s spite. Arrogance. The vengeance only possible through the anger of failed ambition. You destroy the world to keep anyone else from winning it.

So yeah, the Hilliary Clinton parallels are pretty obvious. The more she fights, the less there is to win. The more she demoralizes the party, and divides the party in order to win the nomination for herself, the less chance whatever nominee we wind up with has to actually win the REAL contest. It’s all in the polls. Since she has started her little tirade, her desperate grasp for political power, both candidates have slipped from consistently beating John McCain to him beating both of them. This won’t get any better. The nastier this gets, and the more filth she throws into the campaign, the worse things become for the Democratic Party. And at the end, after she’s either through trying to destroy Barack Obama, or successfully destroyed him, whoever emerges will be the only one covered in dirt. John McCain will be tanned and rested, organized and armed, and we will be tired, and bitter, and torn apart by internal party divisions.

Can we pull it together and beat McCain? Sure. Unless things get too bad, and all the new people that have been turned on to the process get turned right back off again. Then the damage to the country won’t just be limited to the time frame of the election, but will be a hearty investment in disillusion and disgust for years to come. When the only way you can win an election is to turn people off, then it’s time to consider if losing, and doing it with dignity, is better than winning, and sacrificing decency and your ideals to do it.

I could be wrong though. Maybe it’ll all be fine. Maybe this is a dark little bump and we’ll all forget about it when the election is over, and we all move on to other topics. Maybe. But there are also some things you can’t take back. We’ll see I guess.