The first question George Stephanopoulos asked Obama and Clinton in Wednesday’s ABC News debate was “Do you think [the other candidate] can win the election?” Is he shitting me? In a debate for high school student body president, this would have been an embarassing question. When the debate is between the Democratic Presidential candidates, it’s just retarded.
George SoftAnalysis followed his first question with more of the same drivel, in the form of one Pennsylvanian who asked Hillary how he could trust her, and another who asked Obama how he can be patriotic when he doesn’t wear a lapel pin of the American flag.
It’s not like Softie was lacking for substantive issues to choose from–we have a global food shortage, a global energy crisis, a global credit crisis, a morass in Iraq, a U.S. recession and a domestic housing crisis, just to name a few. Yet the most important question for ABC News and SoftAnalysis was “do you think the other person can win?”
The professional journalists, unfortunately, have left the building and ceded it to the rabble, under the guise of making the “average” person more involved in the process. There are three problems with this. One, it’s flat out lazy. Two, even assuming that a little democracy would be a good thing, a little more creates a tyranny of incompetence. Third, the whole point of professional journalism is to have a group of people who can ask the intelligent questions that the average person doesn’t have the time or training to think of themselves. If the professionals are going to throw their education, discretion and judgement out the window by asking inane, superficial questions–what do we need them for?
At one point, even the live audience had enough of the drivel–Charlie Gibson joked on camera that they were heckling him and SoftAnalysis. The crowd should have mauled them.
The blogs (HuffPo, Andrew Sullivan, The Daily Howler and Glenn Greenwald, among others) are ripping Softie and his sidekick, Charlie Brown, the new assholes ones they deserve.
But will anyone actually be held accountable for it?
