Filed Under Politics, U.S. Studies
Who Would Win in a Fight, John McCain or the American Flag?
I didn’t get to watch the last Presidential debate and I just got around to reading the transcript. Many have spoken about the awfulness of the debate and how the moderators focused primarily on distractions, but I wasn’t prepared for what I just read.
“Do you think Sen. Obama can beat John McCain or not?”
Gotta love that unanswerable question. If Sen. Clinton says “yes,” (which she did) then everyone’s up in arms again about her conceding the race (which, to be fair, I haven’t seen yet, but I haven’t been online much, so I don’t know). If she says “no,” then everyone’s up in arms about how she’s endorsing McCain over Obama.
“I wanna know if you believe in the American Flag?”
What the hell does that even mean? Do you believe that the American Flag exists? That it has superpowers? That it will boldly go where no one has gone before?
It seems to me that regardless of whom you may favor in this race, that anyone would recognize that these are profoundly unfair and disingenuous questions, designed primarily to make the candidates uncomfortable.
May we please start The Revolution ® today so I can quit paying attention to this nonsense?
Tags: Discussion
Comments are disallowed for this post.
Translate
Solidarity
Open Source
Free yourself from closed source software!
Kick Ass Bloggers
Stats
All original content at A Slant Truth is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. All other content is presumed to be used under the doctrine of fair use and retains its original copyright.
Kevin, you’re the first person I’ve seen (mainstream media, blogger, or otherwise) say that Clinton’s yes answer amounts to conceding the race.
I didn’t see it that way at all when I was watching it, and that hasn’t been the conversation about it; and I really don’t see how you come to that conclusion. I believe her answer was yes, yes, yes; but I think I can do better, that’s why I’m running. That’s anything but a concession, it’s just an acknowledgment that Obama can win as opposed to the hints she’s made that he can’t.
I do agree it was meant to be a catch 22 I gotch’ya moment though; but for a different reason. Clinton is making the case to superdelegates explicitly, and to voters implicitly that Obama can’t win or likely won’t win in the general, so she’s the only choice. Hence, her acknowledging otherwise publicly undercuts he own argument. But she had to say yes (you see she actually avoided answering the question until she was pressed on it), because she would have offended many superdelegates if she would have stooped low enough to say no.
The flag thing was dumb worthless crap. “Do you love the flag”? Why the hell should anyone love a flag? If anything you might love the country but not some fucking cloth. But you can’t say that because giving a real intelligent answer will be spun into a negative anti-American sound bite.
The dumbest shit of the night was “do you believe Rev. Wright loves America as much as you do”. Who fucking cares, Rev. Wright ain’t running for office, so how does that even tangentially relate to anything regarding the American people’s issues. Secondly, how on earth is Obama supposed to read another man’s heart?
@Yobachi: Well, I’m not saying that her “yes” amounts to a concession, but that some of the more rabid Obama fans might paint it in terms of “well, if you think he can win and you’re losing to him, why are you still in this?’ I’m talking about folks like the DKos crowd here, a bunch that seems to have lost their collective shit this election (not that they had much to go on to begin with, in my opinion).
But yeah, I agree that your version of the catch-22 was in there as well.
“do you believe Rev. Wright loves America as much as you doâ€
Man, reading that I was glad I wasn’t watching it on TV, ’cause I might have thrown something at the TV that was so stupid. I’m telling you man, I’m even afraid to watch the debate online ’cause I don’t wanna break the new computer I just built.
I keep wondering what the means, myself. Do you believe in the flag? That makes no sense at all. It would have been nice if Sen Obama had replied “Huh?”
@merl: For real! But then if he did, he’d get the elitist thing thrown at him again. Because y’know, expecting a coherent question is so elitist!