How annoying it must have been as a candidate seeking to convey your wisdom and plea to the American people while parlaying yourself to a hyped and complicated, not to mention completely unnecessary, ensemble of You Tubers. Holy smokes!



Web 2.0 has jumped the shark. On god's green earth, who decided, and why, that it would be really cool to inject the meaningless self-productions of You Tubers into the process of refined presidential query? What's the point other than the fact that, yeah, You Tube is kinda neat for, well, You Tube.

Granted, I've never been for desperate demonstration of public inclusion into high profile
"televisionary" events like this. Presidential Town Hall meetings, for example, are ridiculously contrary to their classification. In what town do you know is every single person as straight laced and intellecutally organized as those who stand up to ask things like, oh, "What do you think we can we do to balance the demands of an emerging global economy with the need to retain economic sovereignty, particularly if we are to compete and succeed against China?". And for sure, don't get me going on those creepily scripted NASA video conferences between astronauts on the space shuttle and kindergarten kids. Oh, there's a treat if you ever stumble across one. I'm not a big fan of charades.

Sure, sure. It's a noble gesture to put the contemporary American face into the rudimentary question-answer cycle of these stage shows using the latest awe-inspiring technology. I think a few politicians did this with chat rooms back in the gee-whiz 90s. But certainly this is a new level of contriteness. A parade of time consuming You Tube video clips amounts to little more than a major and irresponsible distraction from time (and, perhaps not so inconveniently, issues) that might have been better spent by these candidates accepting random e-mails, telephone calls, or better yet, commenting on their blogs.