It has been a depressing few weeks for the public discourse.  We saw terrorism reduced to a hypothetical question ripped from the plot of Fox’s 24.  We watched Mitt Romney responding with a ‘double Guantanamo’ and ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’.  We shook our heads as the Democrats debated whether leadership consisted of a vote in the Senate, or a speech plus a vote in the Senate. 

This is not public discourse.  This is not public discourse worthy of the times, the complicated issues we face, and the needs of our country and world.

Take the war in Iraq.  How did that get reduced to whether or not you ‘support our troops’? 

That’s ‘dumbing down’ a difficult discussion to the point of idiocy, when we need to be as smart as we can about extricating ourselves from Iraq. 

A good test of whether or not an assertion has any merit is to state its opposite.  If that is a serious proposition, then the original point is worth debating.  If the opposite is silly, than the original point is merely a platitude.

So, can we imagine anyone seriously proposing that we ‘not support our troops’?

OK, it’s a platitude. 

We need to have a real debate about Iraq.  What will really happen if we leave?  What will that do to American interests in the Middle East?  President Bush warns us of catastrophe, but do we accept that on its merits?  President Johnson warned of the dominoes falling in Southeast Asia if we pulled out of Vietnam, but that isn’t precisely what happened.

We need to have a real debate.

The media need to serve us better.  They commit the either/or fallacy repeatedly in every 24-hour news cycle by just giving us the two extremes of any issue.  So, it’s support our troops or cut and run.  It’s stay the course or catastrophe in the Middle East.  The media allow the administration to frame the debate in these simplistic, black-and-white terms that make the arguments stupid – and contribute to the overall sense of hopelessness so many voters feel.

We need to have a real debate about health care, the environment, education, and a host of other issues, not only Iraq.

My message to the presidential candidates and the media:  give us a real public discourse worthy of the times and the complexities of the issues we face.