Okay...I surfed back and forth between the CNBC-conducted third republican debate in Boulder, Colorado, and the second game of the World series in Kansas City on 28 October. The debate developed more heat than light and was interesting from the standpoint of entertainment as much as anything else. The game took the lion's share of attention though I got to watch each debate-participant “perform.”
The debate-subjects are fairly well established by now and differ little from those of other debates and debates of other years. The candidates' approaches are fairly predictable and the slogan “take the country back” can be expected in overuse-mode, though taking it back from what is not well articulated...just sounds good.
Education, national debt, economy, jobs, national defense/policy, among others, are always in the mix. I was probably watching baseball when debaters discussed the Middle East...if they did, but that subject should have been thoroughly discussed. I checked with accounts of the Associated Press and the Washington Post and discovered that neither mentioned anything about the subject.
The debate was chaotic and again seemed to pit the moderators against the candidates—long-winded dissertations masquerading as questions and then arguments between the questioners and the respondents. The bias of CNBC is well-known as anti-republican so the hostility was evident. Some of the debaters actually agreed with each other and seemed reluctant to get too personal. They occasionally just told the moderators to bug-out while they finished speaking. This was refreshing.
I was watching when Senator Cruz—without rancor—simply reminded them of their bared fangs, using their own pronouncements (elements of personal ridicule) in the debate, which simply pointed out this bias/hostility. As usual, the whole enterprise was about the so-called moderators, who use the debates to satisfy their narcissism, barely keeping from actually informing the debaters of their intellectual superiority.
Of the ten major candidates, I tend to believe the four governors, sitting or former, bring the most skills to the job of governing. The three senators, all now in office in first terms, are bright and have more personal knowledge of foreign affairs with clearly opposing views. The three “outsiders” seemed to not do as well this time but likely will maintain their positions in the polls at least for a while.
By far the most interesting result of the debate occurred when I tuned in whilst having my toast and coffee the next morning to the CBS morning news program conducted by Charlie Rose, Gayle King and Norah O'Donnell, who had as their guest (victim?) Senator Rubio. Rubio had dared to bring up the subject during the debate of Hillary Clinton's enormous and oft repeated lie about the Benghazi Massacre, i.e., that it was not a massacre but merely a “protest” occasioned by an unflattering 13-minute film about Mohammad, the implication being that the poor Muslims just had to protest American style these days, with violence...perfectly understandable.
Notwithstanding that Clinton was flayed by her own admissions in the select committee concerning Benghazi/emails just a few days before, these CBS worthies—either electioneering for Clinton or simply dumb as gourds—declared war on Rubio (verbally, of course) but were thoroughly put in their places by the senator. Rose seemed astonished that Rubio would call Clinton a liar and even brought up the CIA and its director, David Petraeus, in trying unsuccessfully to defend her but had to give it up as Rubio insisted, especially on the basis of the damning emails, that she lied.
Then, surprisingly—perhaps because the CBS triumvirate were in shock—Rubio was allowed to lay out the whole 2012 situation, especially the fact that the Clinton/Obama insistence in September 2012 was that al Qaeda influence was dying in the Middle East, a circumstance absolutely necessary, they thought, for the 2012 election to be successful. Al Qaeda's influence was actually on the rise then and but for Romney's unbelievably weak campaign Obama would never have been reelected. The CBSers simply left Hillary to twist in the wind...they had no answers. They did THEIR candidate no favors.
Unquestionably, Clinton, a compulsive liar, is unfit for office—any office.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
No comments:
Post a Comment