Will the Democratic Candidates Please Shut Up?

By Will Durst, AlterNet

Shut up. Please shut up. No. Really. Shut up. Shut Up. Shut UP. I know you think I'm kidding here, but I'm not. Pretty please. Shut the hell up. Honest to god, it's not funny anymore. Would you two kindly have the simple common human decency to close your pie holes and be quiet for a half of a minute? Is that too much to ask? The hell is wrong with you people anyway? The horse is dead. He's starting to smell. Put the bats down.

Yes, I'm talking about the two remaining Democratic candidates, who just participated in their 20th debate but it seems more like their 8,000th. And if you made it through the latest wearisome exercise in drudgery (appropriately held in Cleveland,) you know what I'm talking about; but if you didn't, you should immediately fall to your knees and thank your lucky stars along with every big rig accident or burnt pot roast or sorting of your sock drawer that kept you from sinking into a hole of depression deeper than a vertical zinc mine once you came to the realization that you will never ever ever have that 90 minutes of your life back.

90 minutes. 5400 seconds. 3/ 48ths of a day. Time enough to cook a four pound chicken and eat it. To listen to Green Day's American Idiot twice. Read an entire Robert Parker book. Roundtrip from San Francisco to San Jose in the fast lane of I- 280. One and a half episodes of The Wire. Three consecutive pizza deliveries from Dominos. 22 and a half, four- minute miles. 551 hot dogs at the rate that Joey Chestnut set the world record last July 4th on Coney Island.

Oh my living god, it was riveting. Like listening to golf on the radio in Mandarin. Made you pine for one of those mid 50's Soviet television documentaries on hydroponic farming in the Ukraine. You know that feeling you get when you've been driving fourteen hours straight and are starting to nod off because its 4:30 am and you haven't seen a car in three hours and you figure you'll just rest one eye a little bit and then open it again real quick? Well, it was a lot like that only with tedium.

Here's a news flash. We don't care anymore. You've broken us. Spending 18 minutes on two health care plans that don't have a gnat's pubic hair's worth of difference between them. Not just a discussion, but an actual altercation over the distinction between the words "reject" and "denounce"? You got to be kidding me. The two of you share similar opinions on every single policy issue of import and spend each of these interminable evenings sucking up to the same special interest groups agreeing with one another. That is not a debate. That's a swimsuit competition with pants.

Somebody, anybody, put an end to this misery. I'm begging you. Before one of us snaps and rushes the stage brandishing a turkey baster full of muscle relaxers. Save us. Please. Texas. Pennsylvania. If you have the tiniest scintilla of humanity hidden in the marrow of your bones you will stop this now. No. More. Debates. Until after Labor Day. And then, I'll personally furnish the bats. And the horse.

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