Posted on 09/09/2011 8:26:38 AM PDT by Kaslin
Brian Williams must crave attention. In the latest Republican debate, instead of moderating, he personally debated all the participants. The actual discussion between candidates was more civil and constructive than the endless string of gotcha speeches foisted as questions on the panel by NBC's Williams and his Politico sidekick, John Harris.
Question after question was an attempt to put each GOP candidate on the defensive. More accusation and White House talking points passed from the lips of Williams and Harris than legitimate questions looking to determine the ideas of the candidates and how they differed.
As a result the debate was next to useless for voters.
Newt Gingrich was clearly incensed by the tone. He responded by telling the media duo: "I for one and I hope that all of my friends up here are going to repudiate every effort of the news media to get Republicans to fight each other, to protect Barack Obama who deserves to be defeated. And all of us are committed as a team. Whoever the nominee is, we are all for defeating Barack Obama."
Gingrich caught the essence of the Williams/Harris strategy. Ask every question as if they were written by David Axelrod to maximize advantage by the Obama campaign. This debate was less about the primary campaign and more about generating video for Obama ads in the general election.
Sadly, the moderators inflicted damage on all of the candidates. In particular Governor Rick Perry came under blistering attack from tweedledee and tweedledum.
Right out of the box Perry was hammered about the number of new quality jobs in Texas. Williams tried to imply all the new jobs in Texas were minimum wage. Perry's record of job creation was denigrated as consisting of substandard jobs.
Perry responded by listing prominent companies moving operations to Texas that are certainly creating above minimum wage jobs.
Only dolts in the media and Obama White House would prefer no job to a minimum wage job anyway. I bet the 46 percent of black youth that are unemployed around the country would love a minimum wage job. In the Obama economy any job is better than the utopian idea about the ideal job which never materializes.
In addition, Perry was portrayed in questions as being anti-science. Perry is skeptical of the secular religion of radical environmentalists: belief that mankind is the cause of global warming. Interestingly, Perry has science on his side. Many climate and meteorological scientists believe the earth may actually be entering into a cooling cycle.
Next, Perry was skewered for not having more Texans on the government healthcare roles. The moderators repeatedly chastised candidates for being against the healthcare individual mandate; they did this by praising Mitt Romney's past support for the individual mandate in Massachusetts. Ironically, Romney responded by giving an impassioned speech on the dangers and need to overturn Obamacare because of its mandates.
But the most damage inflicted on Perry was for calling Social Security a failure in his book "Fed-up". This was an attempt to portray Perry as attempting to end Social Security and preparing the way for the carpet bombing of older voters in the general election by the Obama machine.
As of right now, Social Security is a Ponzi scheme and actuarially unsound as Perry has suggested. It is headed for insolvency. Everyone that passed basic algebra can see the inability to pay the current benefits to the current premium payers in their youth. Money paid into the program today is squandered by the profligate leaders in Washington. Perry has shown courage by pointing this out even when others are afraid to do so.
But Social Security is the third rail, the one that kills your candidacy because over 65 year old voters come out and vote in mass. Younger voters don't show up. Obama and the Democrats working hand in hand with the old line media stars like Williams, demagogue the issue and create massive fear in these older voters. So the program isn't changed to improve it, fix it and hence secure it for current recipients.
At the end of the night Perry said in exasperation, "I feel a bit like a pinata."
But before did, he looked ahead to the other major issue of the campaign, jobs. President Obama, Perry concluded, "has proven for once and for all that government spending will not create one job. Keynesian policy and Keynesian theory is now done. We'll never have to have that experiment on America again."
I only learned 2 things from that debate, that Ron Paul is against a border fence because it will be used to keep us in, and that it’s moronic for Republicans to agree to have liberal moderators at their debates.
PMSNBC
Yeah, every election cycle I wonder if the republican candidates are finally going to stop allowing their debates to be “moderated” by guys who hate their guts, and every election cycle they fall into the same trap like clockwork. Republicans really are the Stupid Party.
Someone please tell me why....why....WHY would these candidates ever have a debate run by NBC. STUPID!!!!!
For this to properly be called a debate, all candidates would receive the same questions and be given the same amount of time to answer those questions and be provided adequate time to articulate rebuttals on substantial points of disagreement. This was just silly. Just another set up job on Republican candidates by water carrying butt boys for the Democrat Party. Who didn’t see this coming?
Rush also asked this question. Why allow moderators who are the enemy? Use Rush. He would help them define their solid points and help showcase how they differ from Obama.
I don't think this needs to be a problem, and Newt has already pointed the way out: Ignore the stupid question and say what you want. Don't let the "moderator" dictate your content, except to use whatever words in the "question" are useful as a pivot point to something you want to say. If they try to call you on it, do it again.
Whether the Obammunist "moderators" finally learn their lesson from this is irrelevant. The point is entertainment. Beating up on the talking hairstyles on national TV is an excellent way to impress Republican primary voters.
Before the debate I made a list of the types of questions I thought the PMSNBC moderators were likely to hit him with, and posted the following :
“
Governor Perry... Many Americans think you are racist, how do you respond to this allegation?
Governor Perry... You have said you don’t believe in Evolution, would you like to elaborate further on your belief?
Governor Perry... You once said Texas should succeed from the union, do you still stand by that statement?
Governor Perry... You wrote in your book that you think Social Security is a ponzi scheme, how can you propose to take away the only livelihood of many senior citizens?
These are the type of questions I expect them to try to “get” Perry with tonight. I hope he is ready, because I can’t even imagine why he or any of them would agree to go to a debate with MSNBC moderators.
“
as you can see... I wasn’t far off, anyone with half a brain could of seen this coming.
Why do they do this every four years?????????
How dumb can they be?????
It happens so often and is so obvious, you have to ask if the GOP party leadership wants it this way.
It is stupid; who needs who more? Do the GOP candidates really need to spend time on a network with a microscopically small audience, or does PMSNBC need to have a candidates forum?
They should snub NBC and let their audience shrink, and appear only on FOX, or some other suitably favorable forum.
NBC needs to air the debate more than the candidates need to debate on NBC.
Blaming Williams or the liberal media is like blaming the berserk chimp or the person who sold it to the fool who took it in and embraced it.
Blame the damfool Republicans who agreed to the setup. Liberals were just doing what liberals do.
Your questions were dead on. If they don’t ask them now, they will ask them in the future - guaranteed.
Get used to it.
One positive thing about the "debate" is it gave Republicans an opportunity to see which candidate held up best against hostile media questions without flubbing or getting flustered.
“and that it’s moronic for Republicans to agree to have liberal moderators at their debates.”
That was my problem with the debates as well - why does the GOP do this? It always comes back to a discussion of political ideology and never a discussion on the issues.
As for moderators (and not inquisitioners), their job is to ask provocative questions, then let the candidates respond so we, the voters, can hear what they think.
Candidates need to take the reins from the media.
Clearly, the fantasy of the Marxist Utopia dies very hard among some on the Left.
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