Watched the Republican You Tube debate on CNN last night. What a lot of nuts--and I'm not talking only, or mainly, about the candidates. I think my favorite questioner, by which I mean the most grotesque, was the fellow who, glowering in front of the stars and bars of the Confederacy, challenged anyone on the stage to declare that that banner is something other than a hallowed symbol of "southern pride." Was it the previous citizen-questioner who had wanted to know why the Republicans can't get any black people to vote for them? That question had elicited political elevator music and it was as if the guy with the flag had arrived on cue to lend some clarity.
The event made Republicans look so bad that even some of them are embarrassed. Of course they are quick to detect a sinister plot. "They chose the questions so once again we get the liberal's [sic] perspective of conservatism," whines one of Power Line's fawning correspondents. But you can't really win elections by courting the votes of these idiots and then pretend that you aren't in league with them. Reagan began his first successful campaign for the White House by going to Philadelphia--not the one in Pennsylvania, to ask a million African-Americans for their vote, but the one in Mississippi, a small town in a small state significant only on account of the murders there, sixteen years earlier, of three civil rights workers. In his speech that day Reagan never mentioned the murders, or that the killers had escaped punishment for their crimes, but he did repeatedly declare his support for "states' rights." Despicable.
In the talking-head commentary after the debate, Blustering Bill Bennett continued the show, criticizing Rudy Giuliani for criticizing Mitt Romney for employing illegal immigrants at his home. The last thing Rudy should do, intoned Bennett darkly, is bring the argument to the hearth and home. I can't now remember whether it was just before, or just after, this subtle insinuation of Giuliani's speckled marital history that Bennett, a values conservative known to have squandered millions at casinos across the land, had deployed the vernacular of Texas Hold-em to extoll the thoroughgoing conservative agenda of the debaters. "They're all in," he said.
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