Above: John McCain and Barack Obama duke it out under the aegis of ... what’s that? Holy Jeebus, it’s the Anheuser Busch logo! The only thing missing is the giant A! Middle two images below: a pair of renderings in the logo’s long history as a beer trademark. Bottom: the same contraption being hoisted over the St. Louis stage in 2004 for the Bush/Kerry debate.

ebates between presidential candidates every four years are almost as eagerly awaited as a Super Bowl, the Olympics or the onset of March Madness, and when they are all over provide pretty much the same sense of anticlimactic letdown. This time around, due to the involvement of a flirty, Rapture-awaiting soccer MILF, it actually seemed for a minute that the recent yawner of a vice-presidential debate could break the mold – until Mrs. Palin opened her mouth and started spewing out the same pre-programmed homilies as everybody else. It’s all so reliably unfulfilling and gas-inducing, like that half-flat mug of Budweiser pulled out of an unclean tap at the local roadhouse. You pay your three bucks and get what you pay for: three bucks worth of bad aftertaste.

But why?

The alternating formats once again failed to impart a sense of freshness to the tired genre. Whether Obama and McCain stood or sat – always uncomfortably and always beneath that glowing, unsettlingly un-presidential-looking shield held aloft by a marauding bald eagle – it made no difference. The would-be presidents looked into the camera, smirked and cringed, over-emoted, pretended not to care and repeated the words “Main Street,” “Joe Plumber,” “teachers” and “firemen” over and over. They were talking, all right, but – including in this year’s comically over-analyzed final installment in which McCain either lost his nuts or took back the night from the Antichrist, depending upon which knee-jerk political hack you listen to – neither candidate bothered to answer most of the softballs tossed at him all evening by whichever spineless, CIA-trained pro pundit was on hand to roll over and play dead for the two-party system. It was like that last time, too, and the time before that.

The final Obama/McCain face-off was a ritualized repeat of every other stilted, predictably scripted affair in recent memory. At the end of it, the two armor-suited men (at least they weren’t both Yale alumni this time) shook hands, blathered inanities at each other’s color-coded wives and repaired to their respective “battleground states” to try and make a dent in the dull-witted “undecided” crowd. Neither suffered a knockout punch, as was precisely the object of the charade, and both were able to crow through their assorted mouthpieces that they showed themselves to be more “likeable” or more “decisive” or whatever. Yet partisans on both sides have been hard-put to say they believe that something was actually being accomplished one way or another during the repetitious, useful information-free, non-sequitur-laden exchanges.

It’s not just the annoyingly predictable delivery of the candidates. One wonders about, but never can quite put one’s finger on, a nagging lack of sincerity surrounding the entire process.

For instance, come to think of it, what’s up with the aforementioned pseudo-patriotic “American eagle with shield” contraption, which has presided over every debate since John Kerry first squared off against GW in St. Louis four years ago? Or, as my former sharp-eyed Saugerties informant, the late, great Jane Van De Bogart, alerted me at the time: “I’m watching debate reruns on CNN and I keep seeing a logo in the background — isn’t that the Anheuser Busch logo?”

Holy crap!

After an exhaustive, all-night research project triggered by that tip, I was able to tell my esteemed Deep Throat she was right on the money. Since 1988, it seems, the general election presidential debates — once run by the almost demonically nonpartisan League of Women Voters — have been controlled by a private corporation — the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) — which has quietly served the narrow interests of the Republican and Democratic parties. The group is co-chaired by Frank Fahrenkopf and Paul Kirk — former heads of the Republican and Democratic parties, respectively — and secretly submits to the demands of Republican and Democratic candidates. Third- or fourth-party participation in the closely proscribed proceedings, therefore, is effectively banished, as is any semblance of open debate.

Since the CPD’s takeover, Anheuser-Busch has been one of the primary sponsors of these candidate- controlled pseudo-debates through tax-deductible contributions to the organization. The beer company paid half a million for the right to be “exclusive sponsor” of the debate in St. Louis leading up to the 2000 election, kept it up in 2004 and was just as deeply involved this time around.

Walter Cronkite, forgetting his CIA Operation Mockingbird training at the feet of Allen Welsh Dulles, has termed CPD-sponsored debates an “unconscionable fraud.”

Fahrenkopf, by the way, has been identified as the nation’s preeminent gambling lobbyist and Mr. Kirk has done plenty of canoodling on Capitol Hill on behalf of pharmaceutical companies.

I wrote an editorial about this four years ago and no one seemed to notice. I’ve gone on minor research binges a number of times since then and found no Drudgery, Huff-puffery or other mewlings from anyone else in Cyberland pointing out this latest groaningly obvious subversion of our electoral process to the tyranny of market forces.

Does anyone else care that the dominant emblem casting its eagle-eyed spell upon the heads of the hopeful leaders of the free world before hundreds of millions of viewers is merely the work of an Anheuser Busch-paid artisan looking to send parched and weary debate-watchers to the fridge for an ice-cold Bud after 90 minutes of nonsense?

I don’t know, but I suddenly just got very thirsty. Honey, could you grab me a beer?