Cruz really showed how it's done. That was a very impressive bit of television, which, as Steyn points out, definitely provided the moment at which the debate was divided into the adults and kids tables.
There's audio, thoughts and a transcript from Steyn here.
I also wanted to post this really thoughtful piece from Rush Limbaugh, I read it on the subway and my jaw practically dropped because so much smart was packed into such a small transcript.
You have to read the whole thing.
Rush calls the debate 'the shameless kill show', but you have to really read everything to get a very clear and helpful analysis of what's really going on here. Of course, the messages are specific to the American political situation, but we can nonetheless extrapolate quite easily to the political left and right in general.
Rush:
"That was a kill show last night. That show was designed to kill every one of those candidates. That debate last night was designed to take them all out. That debate last night was to grease the skids for Hillary Clinton. That was the sole purpose of that debate last night. And the smugness and the arrogance and the condescension with which those moderators went about it finally came back and bit them to the point that everybody watching that debate, everybody, even other Drive-By Media types saw what was going on."
Furthermore:
"Yet the RNC schedules these debates, and they schedule these debates with the very enemies of the Republicans. We all know, everybody knows, they are the enemy. They're not just the media. They are the enemy, and yet the scheduling continues. And we all know why. The Republican Party, inside the Beltway, the establishment, whatever you want to call it, thinks they have to bend over backward to prove their fairness, that they are not all of these things they're alleged to be.
"So they take every option, every opportunity to try show these people, "No you don't understand. We're not racist, sexist, bigot, homophobes." There's no changing their minds. These moderators last night didn't care a whit what these candidates think of anything. You could tell that by virtue of the questions. They didn't have any interest whatsoever in what these candidates thought. The only objective they had was to take them out."
Rush makes a very important point.
The RNC wants to lose. Losers gotta lose.
RNC politicians with the exception perhaps of Trump, Cruz, Fiorina and Carson are very comfortable being losers.
It's like the Republicans have their very own brand of submissive dhimmitude toward their overlords in the Democratic party/world. The Republicans are happy getting their little bit of gruel and cocktail party invitations and have veered so far to the left that they will have to be dragged kicking and screaming, and voted out wholesale to make way for new blood.
If the Republican party was serious about winning-which I am not at all convinced that it is-they would host their own debate and throw it up on this thing called the INTERNET. They would tell the networks to shove it.
They would get someone like Mark Levin, Mark Steyn, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Hugh Hewitt (I could go on...) or some other intelligent conservative human being to grill ("moderate") the candidates about real issues that are of real concern to non-leftist Americans.
If the GOP itself had any balls whatsoever, they would tell the Mainstream Media SuperPAC to shove it and make their own "debate" and their own rules. Who needs TV? Who needs the crumbs and gruel of the Mainstream Media Democratic SuperPAC?
The reason that the party itself goes along with this charade and kvetches about 'fairness' after is because it really doesn't want to win. It's very happy thankyouverymuch to have people in office, as Mark Steyn says, but not in power.
And power and money are the main things that we can be completely confident that the political left and it's cultural attaches will preserve at all costs.
If the thinking conservatives in America BUILD IT, they will come.
This battered wife/Stockholm Syndrome relationship between faux conservatives and the political left is nauseating, yet surmountable, and that's what is so acutely maddening to observers like me.
Actual conservatives in America, hell bent on winning, need to grow a pair and think 'out of the box' about debates and getting the message out there.
