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Saturday, October 13, 2012

One more thought on the VP debate

Taibbi:

Biden did absolutely roll his eyes, snort, laugh derisively and throw his hands up in the air whenever Ryan trotted out his little beady-eyed BS-isms.

But he should have! He was absolutely right to be doing it. We all should be doing it. That includes all of us in the media, and not just paid obnoxious-opinion-merchants like me, but so-called "objective" news reporters as well. We should all be rolling our eyes, and scoffing and saying, "Come back when you're serious."
Put the whining from FOX and from Limbaugh aside for a second.  We know who they are and why they say the things they're going to say.  The real danger to democracy lies in our timid, smug mainstream political press and its insistence on "civility" over substance in our politics.

We live in an environment where Paul Ryan can propose destroying Medicare, lie about it, and get away with that so long as he doesn't seem particularly agitated.   The trick to keeping the big time professional punditry on your side is to avoid acting like any of this actually matters to anyone.  It doesn't matter to them, after all.  Why should the rest of us care?

2 comments:

Clay Kirby said...

You'll like this one:
http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2012/10/hell-bent-for-election

Owen Courrèges said...

Jeff,


The criticisms on substance grounds can be made on both sides. Obama's healthcare plan is premised on major cuts to Medicare, which in turn in premised on the idea that cutting reimbursements will somehow not cut services received. You can always accuse the opposition of being dishonest or disingenuous because both sides are trying to present "have your cake and eat it to" policies to avoid alienating voters in a close election.


As a result, some degree of civility is expected. If every time one side told a whopper or a half-truth the other interjected, laughed, or rolled their eyes, the debates would be nothing more than a pissing match of passive-aggression.


In any event, being rude to your opponent is always going to work better with your base than with swing voters. What Biden needed to do in that debate was reassure the base following Obama's defeat (which I thought was more of a draw, but I'll take it). Consequently, rude or not, Biden did well by the campaign. Taibbi's reaction shows that. I just wouldn't say that we need that kind of performance in every debate.