Last night’s “debate” had one winner and six losers in showcasing the Democratic Party’s potential nominees for president in 2016: Hillary Clinton, according to all liberal commentators, was the winner going away.
The losers were everyone else on stage — Jim Webb, Bernie Sanders, Martin O’Malley, and Lincoln Chafee — plus Joe Biden, and the American taxpayer.
It was all Kabuki dance: an event that is designed to create the appearance of conflict or of an uncertain outcome. That the questions and answers were scripted and practiced well in advance became obvious when candidates, especially including the frontrunner, started answering them before they were completely asked. And it was an Alice in Wonderland affair as well, with conversations about a fantasy world that only liberals, socialists, and progressives inhabit, with little connection to reality.
The issues scripted in advance and offered by host Anderson Cooper were predictable: gun control, global warming, the Middle East adventures, income inequality, student loans, raising the minimum wage to $15, and free college education. The enemies were just as predictable: Republicans and Wall Street.
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Clinton, the de facto winner, remained true to her “values and principles” even while waffling in defending them. When pressed about her opposition to the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership), when earlier she was strongly in favor of it, Clinton was firm: “I’m not taking a back seat to anybody on my values, my principles or the results that I get. Everybody on this stage has changed a position or two.” Thanks to AP Fact Check, her support for the TPP as far back as November 2012 was repeatedly consistent, with Clinton continuously claiming that it “sets the gold standard in trade agreements” but last night she declared that the agreement as presently cobbled together “didn’t meet my standards.”
On Syria she bloviated:
What I said [as secretary of state] was we had to put together a coalition … and yes, it included Arabs, people in the region, because what I worry about is what will happen with ISIS gaining more territory, having more reach, and frankly posing a threat to our friends and neighbors in the region and beyond.
The only trouble with that statement is that it was, according to AP Fact Check, almost completely incorrect:
Clinton is ignoring much of the context of her coalition-building effort in Syria: it was designed to push Syrian President Bashar Assad from power [and] not to target the Islamic State or other extremist groups….
At the time, the Islamic state didn’t exist.
But facts in the Alice in Wonderland world of progressives really don’t matter. When Bernie Sanders claimed, “Almost all the new income and wealth is going to the top 1 percent,” AP Fact Check said he was relying on outdated information, and that in fact the 99 percent in 2014 actually saw their incomes increase by 3.3 percent, the biggest gain in 15 years.
Red State’s Erik Erickson saw through the charade:
The American people saw just how much out of touch the Democrats are. The Democrats, in playing to their crowd in the debate hall, went for the echo chamber. They are a bunch of big spenders who will take our guns and surrender our national sovereignty….
They are for killing kids and burdening small businesses with new government programs while refusing to cut anything.
They care more about global warming than helping working families.
The issues left undisturbed in last night’s big show-and-tell are vastly more important: the continued dumbing down of the kids in public schools thanks to Common Core, the threat of local Islamic terrorism, Article I Section 8 of the Constitution — which each candidate was prepared to take an oath to defend and enumerates the limited power of the federal government (especially the executive branch) — the Federal Reserve, the question of “who pays for all this?”, cutting government spending and shrinking Leviathan, the Planned Parenthood scandal, drugs that influence killers who perpetrate massacres such as the most recent one in Oregon, the Iranian nuclear deal, CIA involvement in the Middle East, privacy from government snooping, and drones killing innocents.
But last night’s affair was Kabuki all the way, with Clinton the declared winner, virtually eliminating a potential bid from Joe Biden and making Bernie Sanders look like a survivor of electric shock treatments that fried his brain but levitated his hair.
If Clinton is able to do to Republican candidates what she did to her so-called opponents on stage in Las Vegas last night, the guns and wallets belonging to American taxpayers will continue to be under attack long after America is declared to be an “Obama-free” zone.
A graduate of an Ivy League school and a former investment advisor, Bob is a regular contributor to The New American magazine and blogs frequently at www.LightFromTheRight.com, primarily on economics and politics. He can be reached at [email protected].
