The Great Debate That Wasn’t

I remember from my 1960s activism, we used to say, “What if they gave a war and nobody came?”  Age and the cynicism of experience has taught me that won’t happen, but something almost as incredible did.  What if they gave a debate and nobody came?  It would be most embarrassing to the Republican Party and the Republican Ministry of Propaganda, Fox, who sponsored the debate in their fair and balanced attempt to elect Republicans.   The occupants of the stage were all nobodies, because none of the Republican headliners showed up.

The 2012 presidential campaign lurched to an unconventional start Thursday night, as the Republican Party put several lesser-known candidates on display in the first debate of the season.

A handful of second-tier contenders was given 90 minutes of precious national TV time after better-known GOP contenders declined to participate. The event might have played to the advantage of Tim Pawlenty, the most heralded of those on the South Carolina debate stage. But it didn’t exactly work out that way.

Instead, tough questioning from the debate panel repeatedly put the former Minnesota governor on the defensive. At a moment he hoped to use to introduce himself to voters who, he acknowledged, know very little about him, he was forced to explain why he balanced his state’s budget by borrowing $6 billion from local school districts, leaving the state billions of dollars in the red.

Then came a discussion of Pawlenty’s past support for an energy cap-and-trade system, a climate-change initiative that Republicans almost universally condemn.

Chris Wallace of Fox News [Faux Noise delinked], which cosponsored the event and carried it live, prefaced his question to Pawlenty by saying that he would play for viewers an ad in which the then-governor delivered a pitch that, Wallace said, suggested Pawlenty was "far more committed to cap and trade" than he was now letting on.

"Do we have to?" asked Pawlenty, somewhat ruefully. The ad featured a Pawlenty plea to "cap greenhouse gas pollution now."

Pawlenty said that all executives are going to have some "clunkers" in their backgrounds.

"I made a mistake," he said. "Nobody’s perfect."…

Inserted from <LA Times>

Paws is trying to run as a moderate (a lie), but Faux Noise ambushed him.  I suppose they don’t want anyone who even sounds moderate.  Then there was the tinfoil contingent.

It may have been the moment when former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson extended his riff about how his reality TV show would be different from Sarah Palin’s “crawling on her hands and knees up the ice flow in Alaska.”

Or perhaps it was when Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.) explained why not everyone would use heroin if it were legalized.

Either way, the Libertarian-minded iconoclasts who bookended the stage here Thursday night at the first Republican presidential primary debate provided plenty of highlights and some substance, but also took the forum wildly off track at times.

The result: South Carolinians already a bit on edge about the lack of top-tier GOP names at their debate got a little hotter under the collar.

“I’m not going to comment on that,” Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.) said when asked about Paul’s heroin comments. “Unbelievable that they even came out in this debate.”… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <Huffington Post>

I trust that the audience would be happy with Paul’s racism, but his drug and foreign policies make him unacceptable to them, just as his racism, forced religious dogma, and desire to dismantle social security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment benefits and the rest of the safety net make him unacceptable to all on the left except for those few extremists who share his tinfoil hat.

There were no winners.  The losers were the Republican Party and Faux Noise,