skippy the bush kangaroo

Thursday, April 17, 2008

not up for debate

jill at brilliant at breakfast weighs in on last night's "debate"...

the war in iraq doesn't matter because it's going so swimmingly, even after a suicide bomber hit a funeral procession just north of baghdad today iraq is not "standing up so we can stand down" and vp-wannabe condi "totture dominatrix" rice says that diplomats who refuse posts in iraq will be terminated. the economy doesn't matter, even though oil has topped $115/barrel, housing starts have reached a 17-year low, there's a global shortage of rice which is already causing a humanitarian crisis in volatile north korea. bank stocks are tanking so badly that when the results are slightly less horrendous than expected, the dow picks up over 200 points -- for one day. states with no money to burn are using band-aids to stop the crack in the mortgage dam and keep the foreclosure mess from destroying their towns and cities. if you're arrested for any federal crime (not convicted, just arrested), your dna will be captured and kept by the government forever, even if you are exonerated via trial or charges are dropped. and just to top things off, they're fighting in the gaza strip again.

but does any of this matter to the washington pundit corps? not one bit. what a bunch of multimillionaire pundits are telling you should be important to you is not your dying neighborhood, or your lost job, or your son in iraq, or the trillions of dollars in debt with which your new grandbaby is going to be stuck.
tom shales of the washpost wasn't impressed either:

for the first 52 minutes of the two-hour, commercial-crammed show, gibson and stephanopoulos dwelled entirely on specious and gossipy trivia that already has been hashed and rehashed, in the hope of getting the candidates to claw at one another over disputes that are no longer news. some were barely news to begin with.

the fact is, cable networks cnn and msnbc both did better jobs with earlier candidate debates. also, neither of those cable networks, if memory serves, rushed to a commercial break just five minutes into the proceedings, after giving each candidate a tiny, token moment to make an opening statement. cable news is indeed taking over from network news, and merely by being competent.

gibson sat there peering down at the candidates over glasses perched on the end of his nose, looking prosecutorial and at times portraying himself as a spokesman for the working class. blunderingly he addressed an early question, about whether each would be willing to serve as the other's running mate, "to both of you," which is simple ineptitude or bad manners. it was his job to indicate which candidate should answer first. when, understandably, both waited politely for the other to talk, gibson said snidely, "don't all speak at once."

for that matter, the running-mate question that gibson made such a big deal over was decidedly not a big deal -- especially since wolf blitzer asked it during a previous debate televised and produced by cnn.

the boyish stephanopoulos, who has done wonders with the network's sunday morning hour, "this week" (as, indeed, has gibson with the nightly "world news"), looked like an overly ambitious intern helping out at a subcommittee hearing, digging through notes for something smart-alecky and slimy. he came up with such tired tripe as a charge that obama once associated with a nutty bomb-throwing anarchist. that was "40 years ago, when i was 8 years old," obama said with exasperation.

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posted by skippy at 1:12 PM |

1 Comments:

something may be happening...
Dean is telling superdelegates he needs them to make a decision NOW
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/04/17/dean-i-need-a-decision-now/
commented by Blogger civic literacy, 5:50 PM PDT  

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