Stickin' With the Facts

Because I had to work late last night, I didn't actually get to see any of the presidential debate in action. Today, I got online and looked up some key things. This is what I found:

• 67.2 million viewers watched the debate at home. This doesn't include public areas like bars, airports, or even mobile devices. This is the second highest viewing of a presidential debate since 1980 between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan (80.6 million viewers).
• Based on a poll of 10 of my friends, five liberal and five conservative (Hey, I had to do something at work! Why not poll my friends?), eight were more pleased with Romney's answers and the remaining two refused to give in and held firm with Obama as the reigning champ.
• In an interview for MSNBC after the debate, Rudy Giuliani said of Obama, "He has been a failure as a president and tonight he was a failure as a debater." Ouch! That's gotta sting a little...
• Mitt Romney confessed his love for Big Bird, yet was rude and interrupted the PBS debate monitor many times.
• Fact checkers were apparently very angry (and busy!) with all the facts they had to check. Both of the candidates did poorly on their truth scales.

In this instance, I saw the role of facts being rhetors. People believe facts. It's just how our society has programed our way of thinking. We're told to believe facts, because they are true. We like to rationalize things, and facts, well, those are pretty rationalized if you ask me. The facts that I found convinced me of what was true about the debates. I didn't need to sit here and watch hours worth of clips to figure out this information listed, I just looked up the facts.