Since I didn’t have any grading this time, and since Republicans are harder to listen to than Democrats (and remember, I used to spend hours at a time listening to Creationists), I couldn’t bring myself to watch the entirety of the recent Republican debate. I kept flipping back and forth between it and game two of the World Series (which, as a Mets fan, was also hard to watch.) But I saw enough of it to form a few impressions.
The first is that the CNBC folks absolutely disgraced themselves. They all need to go home and resign. I actually briefly cheered Ted Cruz, for heaven’s sake, when he called them out on the utter stupidity of their questions. The problem wasn’t just the questions themselves, which were mostly foolish and petty. It was that, having decided to go that route, the moderators were then entirely unprepared when the candidates pushed back.
Television political pundits tend to be entirely out of their depth when discussing anything other than horse race questions. Their favorite activity is making stuff up about what “the American people” are thinking. Mostly they don’t know anything about anything, which is why they are reticent about having serious discussions about anything. If you want to see pundits who know what they’re talking about, you have to turn to the sports channels.
Of course, Cruz then went way overboard when he suggested that the questions at the Democratic debate were softballs. That’s just nonsense. Anderson Cooper spent most of the evening positively snarling at Hillary Clinton. It’s just that Clinton handled everything so smoothly and effortlessly that it was easy to think she was being served up softballs.
Anyway, that brings us to the second point. It is now perfectly acceptable in Republican politics to tell bald-faced lies. Bald-faced. Kevin Drum rounds up just a few examples. Of course, most people have consciences that prevent them from being quite so mendacious as the current crop of Republican candidates. But the candidates figure that far more people will see the big, confident lie than will ever see the fact check, so they might as well just go for it.
The final point is that Jeb Bush needs to get out of the race. If this were an MMA fight, the official would have stepped in to stop it by now. Basically, Jeb thought that he was the inevitable nominee–I mean, Republican primary voters wouldn’t really vote for one of the clown car candidates, would they?–and that he would only have to deal with a relatively civilized campaign against Hillary Clinton. It’s hard to feel too sorry for him, though. The Bush family gave us Willie Horton, the pledge of allegiance, and the swift boaters after all.
End of rant. I feel better now. If we must have a Republican president (and I still think Clinton is likely to win in the end), then I really hope it’s Trump.
from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/1isKGsJ
Since I didn’t have any grading this time, and since Republicans are harder to listen to than Democrats (and remember, I used to spend hours at a time listening to Creationists), I couldn’t bring myself to watch the entirety of the recent Republican debate. I kept flipping back and forth between it and game two of the World Series (which, as a Mets fan, was also hard to watch.) But I saw enough of it to form a few impressions.
The first is that the CNBC folks absolutely disgraced themselves. They all need to go home and resign. I actually briefly cheered Ted Cruz, for heaven’s sake, when he called them out on the utter stupidity of their questions. The problem wasn’t just the questions themselves, which were mostly foolish and petty. It was that, having decided to go that route, the moderators were then entirely unprepared when the candidates pushed back.
Television political pundits tend to be entirely out of their depth when discussing anything other than horse race questions. Their favorite activity is making stuff up about what “the American people” are thinking. Mostly they don’t know anything about anything, which is why they are reticent about having serious discussions about anything. If you want to see pundits who know what they’re talking about, you have to turn to the sports channels.
Of course, Cruz then went way overboard when he suggested that the questions at the Democratic debate were softballs. That’s just nonsense. Anderson Cooper spent most of the evening positively snarling at Hillary Clinton. It’s just that Clinton handled everything so smoothly and effortlessly that it was easy to think she was being served up softballs.
Anyway, that brings us to the second point. It is now perfectly acceptable in Republican politics to tell bald-faced lies. Bald-faced. Kevin Drum rounds up just a few examples. Of course, most people have consciences that prevent them from being quite so mendacious as the current crop of Republican candidates. But the candidates figure that far more people will see the big, confident lie than will ever see the fact check, so they might as well just go for it.
The final point is that Jeb Bush needs to get out of the race. If this were an MMA fight, the official would have stepped in to stop it by now. Basically, Jeb thought that he was the inevitable nominee–I mean, Republican primary voters wouldn’t really vote for one of the clown car candidates, would they?–and that he would only have to deal with a relatively civilized campaign against Hillary Clinton. It’s hard to feel too sorry for him, though. The Bush family gave us Willie Horton, the pledge of allegiance, and the swift boaters after all.
End of rant. I feel better now. If we must have a Republican president (and I still think Clinton is likely to win in the end), then I really hope it’s Trump.
from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/1isKGsJ
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