Delicious Zingers are choc-full of lies

I didn't get to watch the debate until about 3 AM last night. In my hazy state of mind, all I could pick out was Mitt lying about a bunch of shit and Obama reinforcing those lies by not really attempting to disagree with them very much. I think I heard Obama endorse the Simpson-Bowles plan to rip apart Social Security.

Anyway I fell asleep on my keyboard about 3/4 of the way through so I wasn't sure if I had gotten the right impression of things.  It seemed way too boring and predictable to be a dream but I figured I'd check around to make sure it wasn't just me with that takeaway. Sadly, no.

The thing is, if you're going to play rope-a-dope, sooner or later, you have to come off the ropes and throw a punch. You bounce off the ropes and land the left and then the right over the top, and then the other guy goes out of the ring in a blanket. Otherwise, it's just a way to get yourself punched in the stomach a lot. Along about the 48-minute mark of Wednesday night's debate, it became clear to me that the president simply was not going to do that.

 Also

It was striking that some of the biggest Obama attack lines of the past few weeks didn’t make an appearance in the debate, another sign that Romney was the aggressor. After the debate was over, Obama campaign manager Jim Messina explained to reporters that the infamous “47 percent” line from Romney didn’t make an appearance because the right time never arrived.

“It just didn’t come up in the debate,” Messina said. “It wasn’t a deliberate decision.”

Here is a list of things Mitt lied about and Obama largely failed to answer. And here's where he tells us Big Bird is secretly underwritten by China, or something.

I'm sorry, Jim, I’m going to stop the subsidy to PBS. I’m going to stop other things. I like PBS, I love Big Bird. Actually like you, too. But I'm not going to—I'm not going to keep on spending money on things to borrow money from China to pay for.

That last one, being a Sesame Street reference, is unsurprisingly therefore the most talked-about "Zinger" of this (literal in my case) snooze-fest. Already it's spawned America's favorite new Twitter account and has even prompted Obama to finally wake up and answer Mitt.. albeit many hours later.

“Thank goodness somebody is finally getting tough on Big Bird. It is about time,” Obama said. “We did not know that Big Bird was driving the federal deficit, but that is what we heard last night. How about that? Elmo, too?”

 I guess you'd call that a day-old zinger. Maybe next debate let's try Twinkies instead.  They tend not to go stale quite as quickly.