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Another Dreadful Debate

I suppose you have to hand it to the folks at FoxNews–they wanted to see candidates taking out their opponents at the knees, and they got some mildly memorable exchanges as a result.  But what is the real result?  Anyone bothering to watch this debate would have come away with a firm impression that the […]

I suppose you have to hand it to the folks at FoxNews–they wanted to see candidates taking out their opponents at the knees, and they got some mildly memorable exchanges as a result.  But what is the real result?  Anyone bothering to watch this debate would have come away with a firm impression that the people in this field really, really don’t like taxes, largely support some means of torturing detainees while using euphemistic terms to talk about it (with only Ron Paul and McCain dissenting, naturally), are against terrorism and for the most part oppose abortion.  Oh, yes, everyone also opposes excessive spending, but no one (except Ron Paul) can think of a single program or department that he would eliminate that he can actually name.  During the last two-thirds of the debate that I heard, no one (except, of course, Ron Paul) gave any indication that he would depart in the slightest from Bush’s foreign policy.  Bushism does live.  Indeed, it stalks the land like a revenant, seeking victims on which it can feed.  The Democratic candidates have to be delighted.  If this is their opposition, almost any one from their fairly mediocre gang of candidates will do just fine in any match-up. 

Again, Ron Paul made the right points regarding torture and foreign policy, but by design these questions bring up those two areas where he is indubitably right and (sadly) entirely at odds with the party’s core voters.  He attempted to give full, intelligent answers to explain the idea of blowback, but obviously lacked the time to do this completely.  Giuliani unwittingly revealed himself to be surprisingly ignorant about the issue where is supposedly strongest when he said that he had “never heard” anyone say what Dr. Paul had said–if he has never heard that Al Qaeda attributes their attacks to our presence in the Gulf and the no-fly zones and sanctions against Iraq, and if he has never even heard of the idea of blowback, what sort of national security candidate is he?  Naturally, the crowd lapped it up, further lowering my opinion of the average voter.

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