Election '08: One Long Humiliation Contest

[depakid]

The strangest thing about the premature reappearance of the presidential debates is the palpable, seething contempt they inspired in commentators everywhere, liberal and conservative. One after another, columnists lined up to shit on the candidates, calling them names like phony and desperate and grasping and clown, and rightly so -- for there was something obviously perverse and obnoxious about these terminal ambition cases hogging the airwaves already, pushing us to get on board with their insane power-fantasies a full fifteen months before most of us should even start thinking about the next election.
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By the time a candidate wins the nomination, of course, the winning candidate will have been made to jump through ten thousand grossly humiliating hoops, forced to wear closetfuls of stupid hats, posed with footballs and hockey sticks, asked to play the saxophone and the clarinet, grilled about his teeth and his haircut and the fat girl he banged in high school, and basically been made to perform like the lowest, scraggliest, street-hungriest organ grinder’s monkey the world has ever seen.
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There must be something to it -- it must be beneficial to the American power apparatus somehow to demean the individuals who seek to occupy its highest offices. Maybe it's because while dignified human beings are unpredictable, an old turned-out whore can be counted on to do anything for forty bucks -- and these are the kinds of people we need in the White House. Who knows what it is. Whatever the reason, they're starting the seal show earlier and earlier each cycle. And this year, the first round of the freak parade took place in Orangeburg, South Carolina, where the Democratic party unveiled its '08 team of craven auto-flagellants.

I watched the debate. Here are three things one can deduce about the race from this first performance:

3) The Democrats keep failing the Dukakis test.

The key moment of the debate, as far as I was concerned, came toward the end, when Williams hit Hillary with this question:

Senator Clinton, Rudolph Giuliani, a friend of yours from back home, said this past week, quote: "The Democrats do not understand the full nature and scope of the terrorist war against us." Another quote: "America will be safer with a Republican president." How do you think, Senator, it happened that that notion of Republicans as protectors in a post-9/11 world has taken on so?

Translated into human speech, that question read something like this:

Senator Clinton, a Republican presidential candidate recently said Americans feel more safe under Republicans. How do you think the notion that Americans are more safe under Republicans came about?

I mean, seriously, folks, this is not a tough question to answer. All Hillary had to say was, "Rudy Giuliani says Americans are safer with Republicans, and suddenly you think it's true? How did you ever get a job in journalism?" and that would have been that. But the Democrats never balk at the inane questions that get thrown their way. For instance, no one ever accuses a Republican candidate of being "too conservative." But every Democrat politely and nervously answers charges of being "too liberal" every election. It is the Democrats' cowering, craven responses to these questions that validate their otherwise fallacious premises.

When media figures hound them with the same list of witch-hunting talking points each season -- Dems are incapable of protecting the country, middle America won't tolerate a "liberal," voters won't elect an "intellectual," etc. -- the Democrats unfailingly become accomplices in the conspiracy by dignifying the questions with serious responses. We first saw this back in the famous Bush I-Dukakis debate, when CNN's Bernard Shaw asked Mike Dukakis if he would advocate the death penalty if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered. Instead of angrily telling Shaw to fuck off, Dukakis calmly answered the question in a professorial tone, solidifying his reputation as a spineless wuss in the eyes of the whole country.

In this case, a string of Democrats again swallowed the Giuliani premise whole. Hillary began her answer by saying, "Well, Brian, I think that, as a senator from New York, it is something that I've worked on very hard ever since 9/11 to try to convince the administration to do those things that would actually work to make us safer..." Blah blah blah blah. Dodd was even worse. His answer began with the line, "Well, that's a great question, Brian..."

That's a great question, Brian? Is Dodd fucking kidding?

MUCH more: http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/7229