Republicans tear into each other at debate

[Soldier4Christ]

Republicans tear into each other at debate 
Rudy accuses Romney of having 'sanctuary mansion' at his home

The acrimony from the Republican campaign trail carried over quickly into the CNN/YouTube GOP presidential debate Wednesday.

 With five weeks to go until the first contest of the 2008 nominating season, the Republican candidates engaged in a full-fronted free-for-all, trying to differentiate their views on immigration, the Iraq war, abortion, gun control and even whether they believed every word in the Bible was true.

Unlike previous debates in which the candidates focused most of their attacks on Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton, Wednesday night's attacks were launched at each other.

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney traded jabs over illegal immigration, something they have been arguing about on the trail for the past month.

Romney attacked Giuliani's record, saying that as mayor, he promoted illegal immigration. And Giuliani shot back, accusing Romney of having a "sanctuary mansion" at his own home.

 "In his case, there were six sanctuary cities. He did nothing about them. There was a sanctuary mansion -- at his own home, illegal immigrants were being employed," Giuliani said.

Romney denied Giuliani's allegation and the two raised their voices as they tried to talk over each other.
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In his quest to appeal to the hard-line immigration wing of the party, Romney also turned some of his fire on the same topic toward former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who has been rising in the polls.

Rep. Tom Tancredo, who has anchored his candidacy on securing the borders and cracking down on illegal immigration, seemed delighted with the give and take, saying the other candidates were trying to "out-Tancredo" him.

Huckabee drew one of the night's largest cheers when he said that one of the agencies he would abolish to control federal spending was the Internal Revenue Service.

"Most people in this country are more afraid of an audit than they are of a mugging, and there's a reason why," he said.

Sen. John McCain, freshly back from a visit to Iraq over Thanksgiving and the most hawkish of the candidates, and Rep. Ron Paul, the most anti-war of the candidates, tangled on two occasions over the Iraq war.

Asked which government programs they would cut, Paul said bringing the troops home from Iraq would save "a trillion dollars."

McCain said, "it's that kind of isolationism that caused World War II," which drew some hoots from the crowd.

 Paul replied, "The real question you have to ask is why do I get the most money from active duty officers and military personnel?"

A retired brigadier general Keith Kerr, who is gay, asked candidates if they thought U.S. military personnel were professional enough to work with gay and lesbian troops.

CNN later learned that Kerr served on Clinton's lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender steering committee.

David Bohrman, CNN senior vice president and executive producer of the debate, said, "We regret this incident. CNN would not have used the general's question had we known that he was connected to any presidential candidate." Political Ticker

In a section of the debate about gun ownership rights, three of the GOP presidential hopefuls said they do not own guns: McCain, Giuliani and Romney.

Former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson quipped, "I own a couple of guns -- but I'm not going to tell you what they are or where they are."

 The debate turned personal when a viewer, holding the Bible, asked "Do you believe every word of this book? And I mean specifically, this book that I am holding in my hand."

Huckabee, a Baptist minister, said,"Sure I believe the Bible is exactly what it is."

Giuliani said he believes the Bible, but not "literally true in every respect."

After that, Romney stammered a bit when moderator Anderson Cooper asked him if he believed every word.

 "Yeah, the Bible is the word of God. ... I might interpret the word differently than you interpret the word, but I read the Bible and I believe the Bible is the word of God," Romney said.

When asked about abortion, Romney said he was wrong in favoring a woman's right to choose -- his position when he was elected governor of Massachusetts.

"If people in this country are looking for someone who's never made a mistake on a policy issue and is not willing to admit they're ever wrong, they're going to have to find somebody else. On abortion, I was wrong," he said.

His remarks came in response to the 30-second video produced for the debate by Thompson's campaign, which included a clip of Romney expressing support for Roe vs. Wade during a 1994 debate against Sen. Ted Kennedy.

When asked what women and doctors should be charged with if abortion was to become illegal, Paul said it was not an issue for the president or the federal government.

"We don't need a federal abortion police, that's the last thing we need," Paul said. He added that the issue should be left to the states and courts and not federal authorities.

On the issues of taxes, Thompson said he'd "never met a tax he liked."

"I've got a tax-cut bill on the table. But I don't do pledges to anybody but the American people," he said.

His response was met by a "Go, Fred, go!" from a member of the audience.

On the issue of trade with China, Rep. Duncan Hunter said China is "cheating on trade ... and it's in the interest of the us to stop China's cheating. Buy American this Christmas season, that might keep your neighbor from losing his job."

The candidates fielded video questions submitted by the public via the YouTube Web site, just as Democratic White House candidates did in July.
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The debate was the first time the GOP candidates had faced off on the same stage in over a month.

CNN's political team viewed nearly 5,000 videos for the GOP debate -- about 2,000 more than they saw for the Democrats' debate.

[Soldier4Christ]

Hillary plants question in Republican debate
Homosexual retired Army colonel activist for Clinton campaign

It turns out that Keith Kerr, retired Colonel., U.S. Army; retired Brigadier General, California National Reserve, who submitted a YouTube question about gays in the military, is actually a member of Hillary Clinton's Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transexual Americans For Hillary Steering Committee.  He's also part of a film production crew trying overturn the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy.

In the final seconds of the post-debate coverage, Anderson Cooper acknowledges that CNN messed this up and states that CNN did not know that Kerr has a position within the Clinton campaign and that had they known, they would have disclosed the association.

_____________

Personally I would not doubt it if Hillary, Kerr and CNN had all planned this together.

[Soldier4Christ]

Muslim Questioner at CNN Debate Was CAIR Plant

How many plants can get through security at CNN? This plantgate episode just keeps getting deeper and deeper! How deep does the rabbit hole go?

CAIR Brags. These two videos are on Youtube which we can't link to here. One was the segment of the debate in which the question was asked and the other was of the cair plant bragging about it afterwards.

This brings the total number of questioners with undisclosed affiliations to anti-Republican parties and organizations to NINE.

Abortion questioner is declared Edwards supporter (and a slobbering Anderson Cooper fan); Log Cabin Republican questioner is declared Obama supporter; lead toy questioner is a prominent union activist for the Edwards-endorsing United Steelworkers

The foliage keeps blooming…a questioner working with Dick Durbin’s staff and a Richardson supporter masquerading as a Paulbot… and a former Jane Harman intern…and the “Blind Black Republican satirist” (a milder species, but still, all in the same family).

Concerned Young Undecided Person “Journey” = John Edwards supporter.

Concerned Undecided Log Cabin Republican supporter David Cercone = Obama supporter David Cercone

Concerned Undecided Mom LeeAnn Anderson = Activist for the John Edwards-endorsing United Steelworkers union LeeAnn Anderson

Concerned Undecided Gay Military Retiree Brig. Gen. Keith H. Kerr = Hillary/Kerry supporter and anti-”Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” activist Keith H. Kerr.

Yeah, undecided  ...  right.

The best thing about Republicans agreeing to do the CNN/YouTube debate is that it created yet another invaluable opportunity to expose CNN’s abject incompetence and the democrats continuing attempt to deceive the people.

[HisDaughter]

The best thing about Republicans agreeing to do the CNN/YouTube debate is that it created yet another invaluable opportunity to expose CNN’s abject incompetence and the democrats continuing attempt to deceive the people.

Pond scum.

[Soldier4Christ]

THE United States is at war in the Middle East and Central Asia, the economy is writhing like a snake with a broken back, oil prices are relentlessly climbing toward $100 a barrel and an increasing number of Americans just can't afford to be sick with anything that won't be treated with aspirin and bed rest.

So, when CNN brought the Republican presidential candidates together this week for what is loosely termed a "debate," what did the country get but a discussion of immigration, Biblical inerrancy and the propriety of flying the Confederate flag?


In fact, this most recent debacle masquerading as a presidential debate raises serious questions about whether CNN is ethically or professionally suitable to play the political role the Democratic and Republican parties recently have conceded it.

Selecting a president is, more than ever, a life and death business, and a news organization that consciously injects itself into the process, as CNN did by hosting Wednesday's debate, incurs a special responsibility to conduct itself in a dispassionate and, most of all, disinterested fashion. When one considers CNN's performance, however, the adjectives that leap to mind are corrupt and incompetent.

Corruption is a strong word. But consider these facts: The gimmick behind Wednesday's debate was that the questions would be selected from those that ordinary Americans submitted to the video sharing Internet website YouTube, which is owned by Google. According to CNN, its staff culled through 5,000 submissions to select the handful that were put to the candidates. That process essentially puts the lie to the vox populi aura the association with YouTube was meant to create. When producers exercise that level of selectivity, the questions -- whoever initially formulated and recorded them -- actually are theirs.

That's where things begin to get troubling, because CNN chose to devote the first 35 minutes of this critical debate to a single issue -- immigration. Now, if that leaves you scratching your head, it's probably because you're included in the 96% of Americans who do not think immigration is the most important issue confronting this country. We've got a pretty good fix concerning what's on the American mind right now, because the nonpartisan and highly reliable Pew Center has been regularly polling people since January on the issues that matter most to them. In fact, the center's most recent survey was conducted in the days leading up to Wednesday's debate.

HERE'S what Pew found: By an overwhelming margin, Americans think the war in Iraq is the most important issue facing the United States, followed by the economy, healthcare and energy prices. In fact, if you lump the war into a category with terrorism and other foreign policy issues, 40% of Americans say foreign affairs are their biggest concern in this election cycle. If you do something similar with all issues related to the economy, 31% list those questions as their most worrisome issue. As anybody who has looked at their 401(k) or visited a gas pump would expect, that aggregate figure has increased dramatically since Pew started polling in January. Back then, for example, concerns over the war outpaced economic anxieties by fully 8 to 1. By contrast, just 6% of the survey's national sample said that immigration was the most important electoral issue. Moreover, that number hasn't changed in a statistically meaningful way since the first of the year. In other words, more than nine out of 10 Americans think something matters more than immigration in this presidential election.

So, why did CNN make immigration the keystone of this debate? What standard dictated the decision to give that much time to an issue so remote from the majority of voters' concerns? The answer is that CNN's most popular news-oriented personality, Lou Dobbs, has made opposition to illegal immigration and free trade the centerpiece of his neonativist/neopopulist platform. In fact, Dobbs led into Wednesday's debate with a good solid dose of immigrant bashing. His network is in a desperate ratings battle with Fox News and, in a critical prime-time slot, with MSNBC's Keith Olbermann. So, what's good for Dobbs is good for CNN.

In other words, CNN intentionally directed the Republicans' debate to advance its own interests. Make immigration a bigger issue and you've made a bigger audience for Dobbs.

That's corruption, and it's why the Republican candidates had to spend more than half an hour "debating" an issue on which their differences are essentially marginal -- and, more important, why GOP voters had to sit and wait, mostly in vain, for the issues that really concern them to be discussed. That's particularly true because that same Pew poll reported findings of particular relevance to Republican voters, the vast majority of whom continue to support the war in Iraq.

According to this most recent poll, a substantial number of Americans believe the surge is working. As Pew summarized their findings, "While Iraq remains a deeply polarizing issue across party lines, there has been improvement in how both Democrats and Republicans view the war. At the lowest point in February, barely half of Republicans (51%) said things were going well. Today, 74% of Republicans say the same. And while Democrats remain far more skeptical than Republicans, the proportion of Democrats expressing a positive view of the Iraq effort has doubled since February (from 16% to 33%).

"Independents' assessments of how the military effort is going remain far closer to the views of Democrats than of Republicans. Currently, 41% of independents offer a positive assessment, while half say things are not going well. In February, 26% of independents expressed a positive view of the situation in Iraq."

Those are significant swings of opinion, yet the poll also found that more than half of Americans still favor withdrawing American troops. That disconnect is a real issue for the GOP candidates, all but one of whom support the war. Unless we're going to believe that the self-selecting YouTube questioners were utterly different from the rest of American voters, it seems pretty clear that CNN ignored these complex -- and highly relevant concerns -- for an issue that served its ratings interests -- immigration -- or ones that made for moments of conventional television conflict, like gun control, which doesn't even show up in surveys of voters' concerns.

THIS is intellectual venality, but it pales beside the wickedness of using some crackpot's query about the candidates' stand on Biblical inerrancy to do something that's anathema in our system -- to probe people's individual religious consciences. American journalists quite legitimately ask candidates about policy issues -- say, abortion -- that might be influenced by their religious or philosophical convictions. We do not and should not ask them about those convictions themselves. It's nobody's business whether a candidate believes in the virgin birth, whether God gave an oral Torah to Moses at Sinai, whether the Buddha escaped the round of birth and rebirth or whether an angel appeared to Joseph Smith.

The latter point is relevant because CNN's noxious laundering of this question through the goofy YouTube mechanism quite clearly was designed to embarrass Mitt Romney -- who happens to be a Mormon -- and, secondarily, to help Mike Huckabee -- who, as a Baptist minister, had a ready answer, and who happens to be television's campaign flavor of the month.

Beside considerations like these, CNN's incompetent failure to weed out Democratically connected questioners pales.

In any event, CNN has failed in its responsibilities to the political process and it's time for the leaders of both the Republican and Democratic parties to take the network out of our electoral affairs.