Sunday, October 10, 2004

Debate notes

I saw a bit of the debate on Friday. I've been avoiding it deliberately - as I expected, I spent about half the time gnashing my teeth thinking "you let that pass, you should have said this....", etc. I'll just have to trust that the all-knowing Karl Rove tested the answers and knows best. If Rove is half as good as the Dems say, everything is well under control.

Kerry claimed to have voted to "balance the budget" back in 1985. I couldn't recall the particulars, but I was about 95% sure that that was code for "raise taxes". And of course that was 20 years ago in any case.

Bush got an environmental question and I'm surprised that Kerry didn't bring up the old BS about arsenic and other rules that Bill Clinton had sat upon until about the time he pardoned Marc Rich.

Oh yeah, the Kyoto protocol. Kerry kept a straight face while suggesting that people in other countries would dislike Americans because we didn't ratify it. That Botox stuff must be strong. Anyway, Bush failed to note that Clinton blew it off too and that the Senate voted it down something like 97-zip.

I thought Bush handled the mistakes question thing well. He started off ignoring the question entirely, then came back to it saying that the mistakes were personnel appointments and he didn't want to embarrass the relevant people on TV. Slick.

Now Kerry wants to portray Bush's answer as "pigheaded" and "stubborn". Of course to Mr. Flip-Flop himself, holding a position for more than 20 minutes is "stubborn".

Who won? I didn't see it all. Bush didn't impress me, but I don't see why the best debater would make the best President, either.

No comments: