Oh Yeah, Another GOP Freakshow

It has gotten so boring. The format sucks. I would rather have four people given four questions over two hours and have a substantive discussion on problems facing the nation. I am bored after getting by the clown bus.....but this format does nothing for America.

Watching the first part of the debate now in rerun. Actually some good discussions of social security. Good substantive discussion. However, no concrete policy. The questions were very negative, and not very supportive of substantive responses. Has journalism talent fallen so low that these folks are all we have to ask questions?

This debate did it for me.  I'm voting for Huckabee.  He put more emphasis on social security than any other candidate including the democrats. 
And I'm just like the abortion fanatics.  I'm a one-issue voter.  Well make that two issues.  SS and Medicare.  If he knows what's good for him,  Hucklebee better say he's for the medicare too.  I just hope he makes it to the next debate before quitting.  lol

What do you boys think about Harwood asking Trump if his whole campaign is a "comic book version of a presidential campaign". 

God I just realized it,  that is about the most loaded question you could give to the posters in this thread. 

And what about when one of the candidates lashed back at Quintanilla like Godzilla spitting fire on Tokyo.
Ya'll probably don't know the irony of that unless you're real media hounds.
Quintanilla is a pussycat.  He's been a fixture on CNBC since the meltdown.
Even subbed for Matt Lauer on the Today Show for a while.  And hosted the NBC Nightly News when they were trying to cope with Bryan Williams' fantasies. 
He's not an attack dog.  But boy the blowback he got was like when Joe McCarthy was attacking Edward R. Murrow.
Shocked me to see that with him as the target.  Sam Donaldson I could understand.  But it was surreal seeing him in that role.

Becky Quick is Becky Quick.  She's a no nonsense financial broad who's also a fixture on CNBC.  She just did her job.  And if the candidates can't handle that heat then how are they gonna handle Putin.

Then there's Rick Santelli.  The dude who stood in the pit at the NYSE and called out Obama.  The media hotdog of all hotdogs but everybody in the financial world loves the guy.
Boy was he a joke tonight.  Acted like a caricature of himself.

Kasich was right........most are talking fantasy.  He needs to be elected.

The difference between the way the debates are conducted for rnc/dnc are stark and clearly biased.

I know that doesn't matter to leftists... but it can't be denied.

The difference between the way the debates are conducted for rnc/dnc are stark and clearly biased.

I know that doesn't matter to leftists... but it can't be denied.


Too funny. You do realize the RNC and DNC set up the format. The real problem is four or five debating allow substance to be discussed, but ten debating allow for a clown show. Having a lot of debates has not shown success, yet the RNC is getting killed, and the DNC is getting criticized for being smart.....again.....too funny.

More rnc debates are left than the dnc will have in total. That you can't acknowledge the bias is an obvious tell.

PkrBum wrote:The difference between the way the debates are conducted for rnc/dnc are stark and clearly biased.

I know that doesn't matter to leftists... but it can't be denied.

My lord, what a bunch of children.

Mike Huckabee made a point of the fact that he has been on the other side of Arkansas politics from the Clintons. "And," Huckabee said, "I lived to tell about it."

And got a big hand.

And we all made it to the Mena Airport in time for 2-for-1 Happy Hour.

This whole debate, which was supposed to be about the economy, and which touched on the actual economy only briefly, when it touched on it at all, took place in the strange wonderland of conservative politics that coalesced when Bill Clinton interrupted what was supposed to be 16 consecutive years of Republican presidents in 1992. That shock to the conservative system was so profound that the Republican party's immune system, which already was being compromised by the prion disease it picked up when it first ate all the monkey brains at the end of the 1970s, broke down entirely, and disease caused it to construct within the party's mind an entire geography of illusion and dark, nameless terrors. Huckabee's cheapest of cheap shots found its mark because the audience in Boulder was made up quite clearly of the people who live in that unreal political consciousness that has been created within the conservative fearscape – which, to them, is a very real place haunted by very real villains.

It is the place where Barack Obama actually is a "socialist," where Carly Fiorina can run on her dismal record at Hewlett-Packard "all day," where Chris Christie can talk about the rule of law while his lawyers back home are answering motions, and where anybody–like, say John Harwood–who brings up the empirical reality within which the rest of us live can be dismissed with an airy wave by ambitious young hacks like Marco Rubio and outright loons like Dr. Ben (The Blade) Carson. It is a place where you can get rousing applause by accusing a panel on CNBC that included not only nutty Jim Cramer, but also Tea Party ranter Rick Santelli, as just another hit squad from what Rubio called, "the Democratic SuperPac–the American mainstream media." Ask them about real positions on real issues, and you're not treating them fairly. Ask them about what they believe to be true, not what actually is true.

(The whining about the questions from the CNBC panel may never end. Even obvious anagram Reince Priebus chimed in, which wasn't enough even keep the wildmen at bay. This isn't a political party any more. It's a wildlife special about life and death on the Serengeti.)

All you have to do is hock the loogie in the right direction–whether that's in the direction of the media, as did Rubio and Tailgunner Ted Cruz, or whether that's in the direction of Hillary Rodham Clinton, who Christie vowed to keep at least 10 feet from the White House by the sheer force of his bluster, which he's going to need, if he's going to keep one step ahead of the law. Do that, and you're halfway home to having had a successful debate. As a matter of fact, the oddly muted Donald Trump seemed like the person on stage most firmly moored in the real world, which truly is saying something.

If I had to guess, I'd say Rubio probably will be said to have had the best night. He really slapped around Jeb! Bush when the latter called him on Rubio's confessed dislike of the job of United States Senator. He looked directly into the camera with his young man's sincerity, and he parried questions about his personal profligacy in just the way guaranteed to appeal to the audience in the hall. He blamed the media for bringing it up.

Of course, when it comes to the actual things he would do as president, Rubio once again is a shoeless, blindfolded kid in a wilderness of rakes. John Harwood–for whom I am going to buy a beer the next time I see the guy–pinned Rubio on the fact that the Tax Foundation scored Rubio's tax plan and found that it would send the deficit careering off into the Van Alen Belt, as well as shoving even more of the country's wealth upward. In response, Rubio told Harwood he was wrong. (He wasn't.) Then, Rubio started talking very fast, mentioned something about his dry cleaner and small business, and probably got more points for being tough with Harwood than he did for his tax plan, which is exactly as bad as the Tax Foundation said it was.

But, mainly, Rubio will be thought a winner because it's plain now, if it wasn't plain before Wednesday night, that Jeb! has had whatever little heart he had for this whole enterprise when it began cut out of him as the his campaign has stumbled along. Even his attempt to be lighthearted about the issue of online daily fantasy sports gambling–which he correctly called "day-trading without regulation"–got stomped all over by Christie, who was mad that they were talking about fantasy football and not about how he, Chris Christie, is personally going to defeat ISIS and al Qaeda by telling them to sit down and shut up. He will keep creaking along because he has enough money to do so, but, right now, Jeb! can't even summon the energy to be paranoid about the media. If he can't do that, he has no future in the illusory landscape of conservative politics, where every microphone has fangs, and where Rick Santelli is a liberal mole.

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a39262/who-won-cnbc-debate/

“The questions asked in this debate illustrate why the American people don’t trust the media,” Cruz said. “This is not a cage match. ‘Donald Trump, are you a comic book villain?’ ‘Ben Carson, can you do math?’ John Kasich, will you insult two people over here?’ ‘Marco Rubio, why don’t you resign?’ ‘Jeb Bush, why have your numbers fallen?’ How about talking about the substantive issues?”

He added, “Contrast that with the Democratic debate, where every thought and question from the media was, ‘Which of you is more handsome and why?’”

Cruz’s criticism was echoed by Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.), who expressed his displeasure by saying “Democrats have the ultimate super PAC. It’s called the mainstream media.” Donald Trump weighed in, too, accusing CNBC of being “unfair” and asking questions he described at one point as “nasty.”

Salinsky wrote:It's not the format of the debate that's the problem.

It's the quality of the candidates.

^ pure partisan bias. Unable anymore to recognize when a game is not fair. Yea Team..!!

You better hope that the tide never turns back again... like it usually does.

I listened to about a half hour of Limbaugh's monologue today (his first hour is the monologue and then he takes calls for the next two).

I've been listening to Limbaugh since before he was even on an affiliate in our radio market.  First heard him on a Baton Rouge station while traveling when he had about 50 stations (he now has almost 700).  Back when he was doing the "caller abortions" (which actually was a very good gag).

And I'm here to tell you (I always liked hearing that phrase),  that what I heard today was hands down with no close runnerup THE most sickening and depressing thing I have ever heard,  not only on his radio show,  but any radio show anytime anywhere.