Here’s a snippet of Tuesday’s debate that we’ve mentioned before, but which bears mentioning again. In it, Mitt Romney, a candidate for the presidency of the United States who is also an adult, criticizes Barack Obama for not being “Mr. Coal.”

[protected-iframe id=”86025ade55d2e3f42994d0063f4577e9-5104299-36375464″ info=”http://p.nowthisnews.com/entry/193/” width=”470″ height=”301″ frameborder=”0″]

“Look, voters, we all agree that the president should also be known as Mr. Coal or Mr. Oil. President Coal, we should call him. President Coal, Russia’s on line one! That’s the president you’ll get if you vote for Willard ‘Mitt’ ‘Coal’ Romney!”

Yesterday, Barack Obama, an adult with children who leads the free world, responded.

Grist thanks its sponsors. Become one.

Obama said voters should be skeptical of Romney’s embrace of coal, mocking him as “running around talking like he’s Mr. Coal,” as a crowd of 14,000 at Ohio University cheered him on.

“Does anybody ever actually look at that guy and think, man, he’s really into coal?” Obama asked the audience as he chuckled.

“Ha ha, look at this jerk! He’s saying I’m not Mr. Coal? I’m, like, five times as much Mr. Coal as that guy! I talked to Biden about replacing him with a 10-gallon jug of high-octane gasoline, but Biden got all pissed off about it. But I tried, man. V.P. Mr. Gasoline. What’s China going to say to that?”

For some weird reason, the Times suggested in an article today that voters don’t feel informed after watching the debates.

Grist thanks its sponsors. Become one.

After three debates and four and a half hours of nationally televised exchanges, Americans have learned that President Obama has a smaller pension than his opponent and Mitt Romney wants to get Big Bird’s beak out of the federal trough, that Joseph R. Biden Jr. likes to smile and Paul D. Ryan drinks lots of water.

But they have not learned as much about what the next four years might look like. With tens of millions of Americans tuning in to the debates, the four candidates for president and vice president have spent most of their time on the biggest public stage of the campaign fighting more about what happened in the last term than what should happen in the next.

Wrong again, liberal elites! Americans who watched the first debate learned all about how Mitt Romney likes coal, after his persuasive argument stating, “I like coal.” If they tuned into the second debate, they learned that President Obama is not named “Mr. Coal.” If anything, the issue has been treated with too much complexity, requiring voters to listen and parse complete English phrases into the electrical signals that allow their brains to process them. A less intellectually taxing debate on the virtues of coal use would simply have the candidates point at a lump of coal and give a thumbs up or thumbs down while smiling or frowning. (Do not frown while giving a thumbs up! Voters find this confusing.)

On Nov. 6, voters will be given the chance to decide for themselves: Who is the real Mr. Coal? This issue is of the utmost importance, given that around 82,500 people are employed as miners by the coal industry — or about 73 percent of all Americans, if my math is correct. The issue is important, and it has been handled with great maturity, as befits the greatest nation on Earth.

One thing is for sure. There is only one true candidate — me — for the most important title in history: Mr. Bump.