Saturday, August 8, 2015

Everything wrong with the GOP debate

Scattered thoughts on Republicans walking right into Rupert Murdoch’s trap.


Here are my spontaneous, disconnected reactions to the Republican candidates’ reactions to a bunch of carefully coordinated snares in the first GOP debate of the 2016 presidential race. Technically it was the third debate of the race, but the one on C-Span earlier in the week and the one featuring all the pollster-certified losers don’t count because nobody watched them. I’ll have another real article with structure and a thesis and such up later.

* Megyn Kelly on the moderator panel. Who approved this? She has a history of picking fights with every conservative- or libertarian-leaning person who comes on her show. She didn’t get the job for her brain, folks.

* Pandering to Facebook viewers who don’t follow politics anyway.

* “Positioned on the stage according to where they are in the polls.” Which polls? Why would you tell us this, except to remind us that Trump and Bush are leading in the arbitrary polls you chose?

* What’s the fat slob with a record of political corruption and groveling for money doing here? Who on earth is John Kasich and why did they invite him to argue here instead of Carly Fiorina, Rick Santorum, Bobby Jindal, or the ever entertaining Rick Perry?

* I apologize for calling Chris Christie a slob. Apparently we’re not allowed to call people slobs anymore.

* The Pledge – This is not a debate. This is a trap.

* “You fully understand…” Why are you talking down to him, Bret? Do you really think he’s a dummy? Do you think your audience is full of dummies who need to be reminded that we’re effectively living with a two-party system?

* Rand Paul feeding Bret the troll on Trump’s pledge.

* “We’re going to move on… to be clear, you’re not making the pledge tonight?” I thought you were moving on!

* “Ben Carson, your critics say…” What anonymous critics? Against whom is Carson defending himself? “Until a few months ago, you were unfamiliar with the political parties in Israel.” Is Obama familiar with the political parties of Israel? Are you, Megyn? Does anyone care?

* Marco Rubio making Hillary the Enemy of the debate. Actually, just about everybody making Hillary the Enemy of the debate. Democrats and Democrat-Socialists are still jumping into the race and all you fools are acting like Hillary’s already won it.

* The Jeb Bush dynastic politics question. That’s seriously the hardest leading question you could come up with for him?

* Megyn Kelly playing the sexism card. “For the record, it was well beyond Rosie…” Who else, Megyn? Why are you pulling out random quotes without supplying context? Couldn’t one argue that hags like Arianna Huffington and Rosie O’Donnell got off really easy being called slobs and pigs? It’d be sexist for Donald Trump not to call them those things just because they’re women and he should be nicer towards them on that account. This is possibly the dumbest thing you could pull out of a bag to discredit Trump, so dumb that no one was even talking about these statements prior to the debate. Isn’t your motto “We don’t make the news; we report the news”? Why are you manufacturing news?

* “How can you win when you’re such a divisive figure?”

* “Would you really let a mother die rather than have an abortion?” Who says they’re going to die, Megyn? What scientific percentage of a chance of dying do you need in order to kill your unborn baby, and who will measure it?

* What is “everyday America”, Scott?

* Mike Huckabee sounds like a nut. What’s he even taking about with the 5th and 14th Amendment? I thought the 14th Amendment was about racial equality, not sexuality or citizenship or some other phony “civil right”.

* “Your Saint Peter rationale”. Seriously, why is John Kasich on the Republican panel? Why not abolish Medicaid altogether?

* “There should be a path for earned legal status…” But there is, Jeb. Why speak for a minute about cutting back on immigration if you’re going to undercut everything you just said in your last 10 seconds?

* What does Chris want Trump to do? Talk to Bush, talk to him, talk to the people who called him a man of “extraordinarily ugly” convictions?

* “What evidence do you have that the Mexican government is sending murderers, rapists?” You’re a reporter, Chris. Why don’t you tell everybody?

* Marco Rubio talks for a minute on immigration but advocates nothing.

* Scott Walker also says nothing.

* What are you blathering about, Chris Christie? No one wants to hear about your not-dead wife.

* Rand Paul makes Christie look like a petulant, constitutionally illiterate stooge.

* “What would you do to take care of ISIS?” Forty minutes into the debate, a legitimate question of policy.

* “How do you look at them now and tell them your brother’s war was a mistake?” Was it? Why are you hurling loaded questions?

* “Would you bring back waterboarding, Mr. Carson?” Neverending stream of asinine, barely relevant questions is neverending.

* “We have to take care of the people who can’t take care of themselves, and I’ll do that through a different system.” Who are those people, and why do they need help, Mr. Trump?

* Bret Baier: Jeb didn’t talk about Common Core, so why don’t you, Rubio?

* Yo, Jeb, Common Core is all about lowering standards.

* “That includes people who feel as though they don’t have the chance to move up… restore the sense that The Miracle will apply to you.” What the Hell is Kasich talking about?

* “If Hillary is the candidate, which I doubt…” Thank you, Carson.

* “To save the entitlement system…” None of these people should even want to save the entitlement system.

* “They don’t need that Social Security check.” But they already paid for it, Christie. I don’t suppose you’re going to say that high-earning people “don’t need another tax break” either.

* Huckabee has the right idea on Social Security, but then he doesn’t follow through to its logical conclusion.

* Do you really want to argue with Donald Trump about his own business ventures, Chris?

* Why is ISIS the target of every single foreign policy-related question? Name recognition? Public paranoia? There are other terrorist networks out there, many of them armed by Iran.

* Barack Obama’s credo is “trust and vilify”. Good one, Huckabee. That didn’t sound canned at all.

* “How could you help a charity so openly committed to abortion rights?” What abortion rights, Megyn, and didn’t we establish earlier on in the debate that you don’t think abortion is that big a deal? Would you really let a mother have a baby rather than have an abortion?

* “I created a culture of life in our state.” What is a culture of life? You sound like a whacko.

* Is Megyn Kelly such a b**ch that she needs to flagrantly twist Marco Rubio’s position on abortion in order to make him look like a wishy-washy opportunist? You’re the top-rated newsbabe on cable and #2 reporter overall, second only to O’Reilly. Shouldn’t you be above that sort of rank distortion?

* “When did you actually become a Republican?” What does that even mean? They’re not competing for the prize of Best Republican. They’re competing for the presidency of the United States and using the Republican party to get there.

* “I have said that Trump’s language is divisive.” Every politician’s language is divisive.

* “I just happened to go to a gay wedding…” How progressive of you. Kasich says that supporting gay marriage is about “showing unconditional love” and “loving them no matter what they do”, and the audience eats it right up.

* Thank you for slapping down the marriage question, Rand Paul.

* Cut from Scott Walker talking about training police and restraining force into a movie trailer about the members of N.W.A.

* Walker’s head bobs when Carson’s speaking are driving me nuts.

* All these people need a more descriptive word than “increasing” and “decreasing”.

* Are we really going to talk about trannies in the military? This whole event is a joke.

* Rand Paul had this exact same Israel argument with a dumb bimbo from the Today Show several months ago. Why are you bringing it back up?

* The Facebook God question is a blatant setup, so why is nobody calling that out? This is an obvious act of sabotage meant to make Republicans look like the religious loony party. Would the subject of religion ever come up in a Democrat debate? How difficult is it to say, “I didn’t come here to exchange pleasantries about my faith. I came here to sell myself and my future vision for government.”

* There’s a word for people like John Kasich that starts with D and rhymes with rag. But I guess he’s also a rag.

* “We gotta stop worrying about being loved and start worrying about being respected…” Aren’t those the same thing?

* Ben Carson is right. You all sound arrogant and stupid saying that you’re the only Chosen One who can repair America’s Obamanation.

* “I’ll be my best to do that.”

1 comment:

  1. This was a great recap. I have noticed that many Republicans are talking incessantly about Hilary.

    ReplyDelete

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