You can tell that CNN needs to retire and let younger people take over. How can you tell? Simple. I needed to time-shift the second Democratic primary debate tonight (07/30/2019) so that I could listen to it while I sort laundry. While I sort laundry, after the Tuesday 7:30-10:30 pm raid that I simply will not miss unless a nuclear blast takes out the power grid and sends us back into the stone age. Then I won’t be able to log onto the game servers anyway, so it won’t matter.
I timeshifted watching/listening to the last one, no problem. Rachel Maddow put the entire debate audio on her podcast stream, I listened to all four hours of it and sorted all the laundry. Two tasks accomplished at the same time.
This week? I go online looking for the audio or video. Can I find it anywhere? No. CNN won’t let anyone post the stream online. They’re trying to figure out how this whole streaming things works. It’s live on the cable! Go watch it! Save it to your DVR! What is it? 1990 still? I’m surprised they remember how to make the television cameras turn on and off. I’m going to have to go to youtube and watch a pirate version (editor’s note, Google is whacking accounts for putting the public feed online) or give up and go to pirate bay and risk my ass on a torrent to be able to watch/listen to the thing without having to have it spoonfed to me by CNN’s nannies.
WTF!?!
I don’t want them to tell me who won or lost. They don’t know. I don’t want them to tell me what the high and low points were. They don’t know. They know how to put on their Depends and which shelf the Ensure is on in the refrigerator, and that’s about all they know. Give it up CNN. Let the young people take over. Go play golf with the Orange Hate-Monkey. You’ll never know how much he cheats because you won’t remember that golf is played with balls and clubs.
…my apologies to old people everywhere. I am one of them. There is a difference between being old and being dangerously out of touch with reality. CNN’s management is in the latter category.
Thursday morning, when everyone who has an interest in the subject has already been spoonfed the take-away that CNN wants them to accept, the video of the debate(s) (It’s still a round-robin not a debate. More like a free-for-all.) is up on CNN’s website. With the first question to Elizabeth Warren, CNN exposes themselves as the servants of big business that they are. At 15:31 in the first video Jake Tapper asks,
Are you with Bernie on raising taxes on middle class Americans to pay for [Medicare for all]?
Editor’s note. Notice the way the video is fubar? (you will on your phone) That ain’t me, that’s CNN not being able to supply a feed properly.
A question framed in that fashion doesn’t even deserve an answer, and Warren essentially refused to answer it. It’s about as misleading a question as “so have you stopped beating your wife?” How do you answer a question like that? You can’t, not without conceding that the battle will be fought on the moderator’s terms and not on the terms of the candidates themselves. As the rest of the first 30:00 minute video plays out, it becomes increasingly clear that the knives are out for the progressives on the stage. As Bernie Sanders rightly noted “you are repeating Republican talking points.”
Skip ahead an hour (ten minutes into video three) and you can hear Tim Ryan, who has been attacking his progressive opponents all night, talk about creating the office of Chief Manufacturing Officer. Just what we need, another bureaucracy that will centrally plan how America makes widgets and where. Anyone who proposes something like this hasn’t got room to criticize anyone for their plans to overhaul other parts of the system.
We make things in America. We are still one of the largest manufacturers on the face of this planet. The fact that the automobile industry is floundering is not because we don’t make things in the US. It is because the US car manufacturers are busy chasing profits instead of making cars that people will buy. It is because the average American simply can’t afford to buy vehicles the way they used to. Because half of America is poor. Let’s talk about that subject. Poverty in America. Let’s talk about the problem at the root of all the other problems. Don’t hold your breath.
There were several areas of agreement. Reparations for slavery was one of them. You want to point to an issue that will hand the election to Trump? That would be one of those issues. I’m not saying reparations are not owed. What I am saying is that racialising the issue of the wealth gap in the US is a surefire way of pitting all the white people against the black people. How about we just admit that poverty is the problem and set out to end poverty as we know it? It’s still more than what we’ve done in the past, but at least that approach will not set half the country against the other half right from the start.
We are fools to saddle our children with debt and then send them out into the world to try to pay all that debt back. This is why student loans are a bad idea. All of the hand waving on the stage won’t change the truth of this one way or the other. How we make sure that education is available and inexpensive to the student is the real question, not whether or not we give people who currently have student loans a free pass. The loans should be forgivable, and in most cases forgiven. But there shouldn’t be student loans in the future. This fact is demonstrable. That they argued about this subject at all baffles me.
What the hell did Marianne Williamson even say in closing? Did any of that make sense? I don’t know what debate everyone else was watching, for my money the clear winners here were Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. Mayor Pete looked good and did well, as did Beto. But making Warren and Sanders the targets was the mistake of the other candidates. They look petty and mean, and their repetition of Republican talking points will not do them any favors with a Democratic audience.
Night two. Is it just me, or did they arrange for Joe Biden to shine all by himself in this, the second night’s round? Kamala Harris seems less coherent this week than she did in the last debate. I was hoping to see her continue to shine as one of the possible alternative front-running candidates. Once again CNN’s agenda that the progressives be the targets is on full display, and Harris is the sole defender of the audacious ideas put forward by the progressive wing on the stage tonight. If she’s not the only defender, CNN would clearly like her to be perceived that way. Again, MSNBC did so much better with their debate. Maybe CNN should have taken notes?
…I’ve gotten all the way to the last thirty minutes of the second night, and I have yet to see a moderator attack any candidate on stage tonight the way that Jake Tapper went after Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. Softball questions all the way around through the entire event. The only ones scoring points on Biden were his opponents. That is as it should be in a debate, but why was the first night so different? Joe Biden is clearly the candidate that CNN wants to be the next president. If anything, that is the most important reason not to vote for the man.
In the greatest movie of the 1980s, Streets of Fire, in the climactic scene, Willem Dafoe and Michael Pare fight with sledgehammers.
That’s right, sledgehammers.
Ten minutes. No soundtrack. Just the sound of two large men smashing the shit out of each other with those giant iron mallets. The ring of steel as they block and parry. The thud of metal slamming into flesh. In the end they both drop the hammers and resort to fists and there’s this great moment when Dafoe clenches his hands and screams in absolute rage before charging his opponent — only to get the crap punched right out of him by Pare wielding fists like a pair of canned hams.
Why bring it up?
No reason.
I’m just sitting here brainstorming some ideas for better leadership selection methodologies than this idiotic debate.
Stonekettle Station, July 30
