The goal of tonight's debate is for the two candidates to win your approval and man can I ever relate to that.
It seems on one level or another all I seem to do is try to win over someone's approval. All. The. Time.
I seek approval from my bank, my kids, my work partner, the people who we work for and virtually anyone I come into contact in the course of a day from barista to bartender.
My own personal approval rating seems to ebb and flow depending on any number of reasons, some which are in my control and some, most actually, which are not.
Deep down inside I carry a concern...no...let's call it a severe paranoid sweaty fear that today just may be the day that I am outed Valerie Plame-style by all the Dick Cheneys of the world and the word "rejected" will be permanently stamped across my perpetually furrowed brow with darting exclamation points shooting out of my head.
So what's this all about?
To me, it goes all the way back to the days when you would run into the kitchen at, say age 4, ready to show your latest finger painting refrigerator bound masterpiece to your mom who is on the phone and her response to you is just north of "SHUT UP I'M ON THE PHONE."
And bang: there it is.
Being that our parents are the co-Gods of our lives (sadly to the day we die) the minute that they disapprove of us, we go right into hyper-drive mode and work harder and HARDER to win it back.
Even Bruce Springsteen wrestled with it, as he tried over and over and over again to win his dad's approval, via all the songs that were cryptically written about their relationship. He was still trying to get it (and he finally last breath did) on his dad's death bed.
When it comes to the debate tonight, I think what is really at work is our secret revenge for all the negativity and rejection that we have been pelted with like an assault of incoming rotten Halloween eggs. Now, instead of us getting the crap beaten out of us in high school, instead of us getting dumped by the love of our lives in college or being the butt of jokes at the office, it is that rare time opportunity where WE get to decide who gets into the club and who doesn't.
Tonight, we are all classic comic book villains who have spent a lifetime of pent up anger and frustration, readying and rehearsing ourselves for this very moment. This is pay day. Our time has come.
To me personally, if you have been paying even a modicum of attention to Trump and his children Skittles, Fredo and Connie and wife Malpropism, the contest ended some 12 months ago the minute that Mr. Putin On The Ritz of Orange County opened his hideous, Joker-like mouth and did his best Howard Stern imitation by speaking directly to the lemming morons of the Tailgate Party who have danced merrily at his events like it was prom night at KKK University. He is a thief, a liar, NOT as rich as he pretends to be, stiffs people, bankrupts businesses like it was his own personal hobby and lies pathologically...and yet here we are in a dead heat statistically.
To me there are two juries at work here.
One is the equivalent of the OJ jury who have not listened to one pertinent thing or paid not one iota of attention to the avalanche of evidence because they were blinded by their own personal prejudices. They had been beaten down by the system and sadly the wrong guy, OJ, was the recipient of this good fortune.
The other jury at work here are the so called independents who are also not paying a lick of attention to the reality of this all because instead of being ENRAGED at their GOP lead congress who made sure not one job bill, or anything else at for that matter, would get passed (insert RACISM here) they are somehow angry at the entire political world of Washington which Hilary Clinton represents.
All Trump has done is shovel pounds of shit into the fields that he no doubt will bankrupt, hoping beyond hope that some kind of significant bounty will sprout when in truth all that he has fertilized is a staggering mountain of even more bullshit.
And yet, astonishingly, to millions, the smell of bullshit is intoxicating. To them it's the sweet smell of success.
The GOP and Fox News used to mask their bullshit with pretend Christianity, NRA pandering (in exchange for 30 pieces of silver) and family values.
Now the blush is off the rose and a dozen turds are officially the new Valentine bouquet.
So, before you warmly accept the next floral delivery and call its scent perfume, my plea here, America, is to separate your mom and dad and boss and kids from the personas of the candidates, take a hard attentive look at how far we've come from the biggest financial depression since the crash of 1929, think about the new health care system (which the GOP mangled), take a look at the smiling faces of the LGBT community who up till now were not treated like equal Americans, while you take in every mass murder shooting from Sandy Hook to Gabby Giffords remember all the incredibly stupid shit that all those GOP candidates from Fiorna to that narcoleptic Huckleberry Hound cartoon Ben Carson and LISTEN to the evidence that is being laid out before you wantonly reject one or the other simply because that is how you feel about yourself.