CNN is hosting the Republican YouTube debate tonight. It’s a format that the GOP candidates resisted. They’ll have to take questions from real life American citizens. It will be interesting to see if the questions are similar in any way to the questions the Democrats had to answer in their YouTube debate last summer. I don’t have a link, but I hear rumors that CNN may have provided the questions in advance to the candidates. If true, that would contradict this:
While the format is the same for the Republican candidates [as it was for the Democrats], don’t expect to hear similar questions.
“This debate is to let Republican voters pick from among their eight candidates,” said David Bohrman, Washington bureau chief and senior vice president for CNN. “We are trying to focus mostly on questions where there are differences among these candidates.”
The format of this debate is all new to the Republican presidential hopefuls, and that’s part of the excitement. The candidates and their campaigns have no idea exactly what to expect.
“There is some sense of the unknown, and so they’re going to be a little bit out of their normal comfort zone, which is a good thing.”
Or not. We’ll see.
The Republican race is really much more interesting than the Democratic race. The Republican field is like a scene from the Island of Misfit Toys.
First we have a pro-choice (mostly) former mayor of the morally degenerate New York City, who takes a neo-conservative line on foreign policy, and a Wall Street line on domestic policy. Known for busting up the mafia, he hired a mob-connected crook to be his police commissioner. Hoping to represent the party of conservative Christian values (but also of Mark Foley, David Vitter, and Larry Craig), Guiliani is in the news for “bill[ing] obscure city agencies for tens of thousands of dollars in security expenses amassed during the time when he was beginning an extramarital relationship with future wife Judith Nathan in the Hamptons.”
It’s a recipe that must be unpalatable to many Christian conservatives. Yet, the fundies experience similar heartburn when they consider the prospect of hiring a Mormon for the job of commander-in-chief. Forget that he’s a Massachusetts liberal moderate with a pro-choice record. Forget that he once had the uncommon bad sense to strap the family dog to the top of his car and go out on the interstate. What if God doesn’t favor Mormons?
At a recent Huckabee event in Iowa, Glenda Gherkey, an evangelical from Evansdale, posed a question to the candidate.
“I’m concerned a lot of Christians are thinking about the values issues and forgetting about the creator behind the values issues,” Ms. Gherkey said. “I guess I feel like this country and this world needs a president who would be able to pray to the God of the Bible and he would be able to hear his prayers.”
She wondered, Would Mr. Romney’s prayers “even get through”?
I don’t know about you, but the possibility of a busy signal on the God Hotline just wasn’t something I had considered before. But then I’m not fucking crazy and I don’t vote in Republican caucuses and primaries.
Romney is facing a lot of discrimination about his faith but that doesn’t prevent him from saying that he won’t have any Muslims advising him on foreign policy.
Meanwhile, Mike Huckabee is precisely the kind of candidate that would walk around praying: ‘can you hear me now’. Educated at highly esteemed Ouachita Baptist University and Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Huckabee is no more clear on the concept of evolution than good ole William Jennings Bryan.
But don’t let his 19th-century outlook on theology fool you. Huckabee is a rock and roller who went out of his way as Governor of Arkansas to pardon Keith Richards.
“It’s a long process, pardoning,” Huckabee said, placing a hand on my shoulder. “It takes a lot of paperwork. And the funny thing is, people said to me afterwards, ‘Governor, you’ll do that for Keith Richards, but you wouldn’t do that for an ordinary person.’ And my answer to that is always, ‘Hey, if you can play guitar like Keith Richards, I’ll consider pardoning you, too.’?”
It makes one wonder about Huckabee’s devotion to the war on drugs and, just maybe, equality before the law. But don’t be confused. This is a Republican nominating process and nothing makes sense. For example, there is another candidate…raking in lots of money and slowly rising in the polls, he’s managed to cobble together a coalition of anti-war protesters and skinhead racists. He opposes the stationing of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan…and Korea…and Japan…and Germany…and every damn other place. He wants to shut down the department of education, the IRS, and pretty much everything else.
The tree-hugger/national socialist candidate has more money and is polling almost as well as John McCain…the candidate the press loves to hype and that Republicans love to hate. McCain thinks the war in Iraq was the right thing to do and that victory is about 45-minutes away. After Bush’s team savaged him in 2000…accusing his wife of everything short of huffing glue and McCain of fathering black children…McCain decided to forgive, forget, and then suck-up.
If McCain is known as an opponent of torture (having suffered five years of torture himself) the same cannot be said of Duncan Hunter of San Diego. Confronted with evidence that prisoners were being tortured in Guantanamo Bay, Duncan rationalized:
“Now, how do we treat these people? I sent down yesterday for the menu from Guantanamo, so that the average American could understand how we’re brutalizing people in Guantanamo, and I’ve got it right here. For Sunday they’re going to be having — let me see — orange-glazed chicken, fresh fruit groupe, steamed peas and mushrooms, rice pilaf, another form of torture for the hijackers. We treat them very well.”
How’s that for batshit insane? It’s almost as nuts as making a Law & Order actor the president. Fred Thompson used to be a competent, if lazy, U.S. Senator. Before that he was Nixon’s mole in the Judiciary Committee’s Watergate investigation. He looks like a somewhat senile grandfather…but he’s best known for his promiscuity many sexual conquests.
Rounding out the list is a man no mother could love: Colorado Representative Tom Tancredo. Tancredo is a deep thinker known for pondering the unthinkable.
Colorado Republican Tom Tancredo said that the best way he could think of to deter a nuclear terrorist attack on the U.S. would be to threaten to retaliate by bombing the holiest Islamic sites of Mecca and Medina.
Being a savvy politician and student of electoral politics, Tancredo knows how to win the Floridian vote.
“Look at what has happened in Miami,” Tancredo whined. “It has become a Third-World country. You just pick it up and take it and move it someplace. You would never know you’re in the United States of America. You would certainly say you’re in a Third-World country.”
It would all be funny as hell if it weren’t a fact that one of these fools will win the nomination and have at least a 40% chance of winning the presidency.
For tonight at least, they’ll all be on a stage in St. Petersburg, Florida trying out-crazy each other. It will be quite a competition.
