Tom Brokaw

In no particular order...

• Tom Brokaw's claim that he's "just the hired help" really means that he's just a whore in Barack Obama's mainstream media brothel. Let's be absolutely clear about this. The Obama Doctrine question, where "there was no national interest at stake" business absolutely sealed this particular deal. In the tank is Brokaw. So bad it is, it's making my inner Yoda come out.

 

• The questions sucked, big time. Town Hall debates are supposed to be fun. This one wasn't. Mainly because the questions sucked. There was only one off the wall question, and it was asked at the end. The rest of them dovetailed with what Brokaw wanted to ask. Because of their suckitude, one can hardly blame the candidates for ignoring the questions entirely. I'm particularly inclined to give McCain a pass, because, after all, this only his third opportunity for mainstream media coverage.

 

• I'm not really getting the main punditry reaction, from the people on Fox, no less, and around the blogosphere, which seems to be that McCain didn't do very well, and if he did, it really isn't going to stop the Obama freight train. I think they're wrong. Dead wrong. He did fantastically---mainly because he didn't let Obama get away with anything, like he did in the last debate. He hit, and he hit hard, and he wouldn't let up. Yes, this means he showed some disrespect for the actual format, but, given how sucky the format and the questions turned out to be, who could blame him?

 

• I thought Obama was definitely stronger on health care questions.  McCain simply cannot, for whatever reason, eloquently and simply state what his health care plan is all about.   Deductions just don't make for interesting points, I guess.  But Obama just showed again how inexperienced he is with the foreign policy questions, and finished weakly, if you ask me. At one point he made a very funny gaffe, saying something to the effect that, "My opponent thinks I'm green behind the ears." This is just from memory, so I may be wrong, but that's what I heard, but it's absolutely true. The phrase may be "wet behind the ears" but what he said actually works quite well. He is. Both wet and green behind those humongous ears of his.  That he would still, for all intents and purposes, invade Pakistan, even if he phrased it in a more nuanced way, speaks for itself. Pakistan is our ally in the War on Terror. You don't invade allies, even if you don't like how they're helping. And if you do, you do it covertly and you certainly don't announce it to the world.  You don't even give a freakin' hint of it.  Like, duh. Maybe Obama should see if Henry Kissinger would come over to the dark side for some serious cash. He could use some schooling in this particular school of foreign policy thought/action.

 

To my mind, McCain won fair and square.  He showed he was the more experienced candidate, and perhaps, that was just enough to sow some seeds of doubt into the minds of those undecided voters about The Chosen One.  I doubt it will help him all that much, though.  He's getting the media to look into some of his talking points about Ayers and Fannie and Freddie, but they're so in the tank that it's really not enough.  He's got to give a strong performance at next week's debate.  I would like to think that Bob Schieffer is, perhaps, not quite so much in the tank as the rest of the moderators, so McCain will at least have a fighting chance.  But who knows?