The short answer is that I don’t feel like cleaning up all the brains, blood and bone after multiple head-explosions. The long answer follows.
The fact that a Presidential election (Is it “the most important Presidential election” ever? This has been claimed about almost every election I can remember, and I remember all of them since I was 10 years old. The Chicken Little Principle applies. Maybe it is, but the whole concept has been abused) is really and truly going forward with these two epically bad candidates as the public’s only serious alternatives represents a catastrophic failure of our system on many levels. This is not a good sign. We could not reach such a dire point if both parties, the public, our institutions, culture and values had not fallen apart in chunks. For me, watching the debate would feel like watching a bloody car crash involving close friends and relatives, except in their car seats instead, without seat belts, will be the United States of America.
I can’t stand watching or listening to either Donald Trump or Joe Biden. Biden was hard to tolerate when he had all of his metaphorical marbles; he was so clearly a mediocrity who had manipulated the political system to achieve power and influence beyond his ability, the perfect Peter Principle politician. Now, he’s infuriating for other reasons, as the fact that he is even running for office demonstrates unprecedented cynicism and lack of responsibility by so many in the Democratic Partly and his Praetorian Guard. Well, another mediocrity, Sen. Warren G. Harding of Ohio, was made President a cemtury ago by a cabal of political manipulators who got him nominated as a “dark horse” after they wheeled and dealed in a “smoke-filled room, so there is some precedent for what Biden represents. But Harding, when he was elected, was a lot healthier and compos mentis than Joe—and he died in office anyway.
Trump, if anything, annoys me more than Biden. In a debate, his proclivities and bad habits will drive me to the edge of madness. His clumsy use of language, his intrinsic boorishness, his baked-in hucksterism—it’s like watching a third-rate Harold Hill—and most of all, his lack of self-discipline, make watching Trump debate genuinely painful.
Just as I argued here in 2015 that one of Trump’s GOP adversaries in the primary debates could have taken Trump out with a well-planned Joseph Welch moment (or, for the historically untaught, a Lloyd Bentsen moment), Trump should have many opportunities to take Biden out, but he doesn’t have the wit to do it cleanly. I would advise him to wait until Joe mumbles and garbles some answer and say to the moderator, “I’m sorry, but that made no sense to me. Could you understand it? How am I supposed to respond if he can’t communicate more clearly than that?” If Biden starts talking about abortion, Trump should be ready to ask, “Wait a minute, you say you’re a devout Catholic. That means you believe that human life begins at conception. If you really believe that, how can you be so enthusiastic about killing the unborn? I don’t understand. Is it just for votes, Joe? You’re willing to let helpless human beings die for votes?” I have a lot of these. Every time one of those moments pass, it will feel to me like watching a Red Sox slugger whiff on a hanging curve over the middle of the plate with the bases loaded in the World Series.
Except that I like the Boston Red Sox.
No, I won’t watch this debacle. I’ll dissect the transcript and cherry-pick through the video. Whatever happens, it will feel like a great country is dying and a brilliant experiment is finally failing. I don’t see how it can feel like anything else.
Ethics Alarms 
What a colossal waste of time and money. It is literally inconceivable to me that any voter might decide who to vote for based on anything either candidate could possibly say or do in the course of this opera buffa. So dumb for so many reasons!
I haven’t decided for sure whether I will watch the debate (likely not), but if I do it will be merely to see if Biden’s handlers have perfected their “secret sauce” to keep Joe upright and somewhat coherent for the duration of the event. Of course if he is neither of those, it will just be declared to be another of those “cheap fake” videos that those “MAGA Republicans” have perpetrated.
I have recently begun wondering if the debate isn’t a “put up or step down” moment for Joe and company, against those who want to replace him it on the ticket. If Joe goes down in flames, it will strengthen the calls for someone else to seek the nomination at the convention. If he doesn’t die onstage or babble incoherently at every question, his people will declare it a great success.
Interesting times!
I too, am waffling, but I feel that if I don’t watch it with my own eyes, I’ll never really know what was said. It will go through the distortion machines immediately with its original form never seen again.
I don’t blame you. It is unlikely that people’s minds will be changed. It is likely that CNN’s moderators will put their fingers on the team Biden scale and not present a balanced approach. More to the point, these debates are not debates anyway. Positions of candidates are not developed because each side is given a different question. Trump will be asked if he accepts the results of the 2020 election to goad him. Such a question is irrelevant now but the goal is to get under his skin.
I might be willing to watch if each side had to defend their positions on :
The level if immigration and the US responsibility to be a island of security for all that enter legally or illegally.
Strategy to contain the expansionary efforts of our chief political rivals Russia, China. Iran and the DPRK
The role of government as it relates ensuring equal economic and social success and what responsibilities does the electorate have in their own pursuit of happiness.
These are the macro fundamental issues that all the micro issues are derived.
You’re employing the same debate strategy I’ve used for years. There’s just no sense in sitting there flaming over something one candidate says causing you to miss other things that are said.