*Unless you live in New Hampshire or get the exciting Bloomberg Channel on your cable network.
Well, there are plenty of questions surrounding tonight's GOP debate, but one of them overrides them all.
Will the candidates soundly condemn the Washington Post's outrageous attack on Rick Perry? Will Herman Cain again play the race card by bringing it up as he did last week? While a few of the braver candidates dared to use the word "entitlements" in the last two debates, will any of them have the cheek, the gall, the moxie, the sheer effrontery to use the term "lavish government pensions" in tonight's debate? Will any of them, after having read Maggie's Farm this morning (as I'm sure they all do), call for NASA to be severely downsized? Will Rick Perry continue to endorse the slaughter of Innocent Young Girls™ (copyright Michele Bachmann Enterprises 2011) with the HPV vaccine? If he does, will Rick Santorum and Ron Paul have to pay Bachmann royalties to use her favorite copyrighted phrase in their own spittle-spewing diatribes?
So there are some of the questions surrounding tonight's debate. But, as I said, there's one little mystery that far outweighs them all:
Why the hell isn't it being aired? Or even mentioned?
Zero articles about it this morning on Fox, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, USA Today or the Washington Times. There's a big splashy pic on the Washington Examiner's home page, but the article appears to be offline.
The Washington Post, which is co-hosting the event, has an article here. The streaming link is on the page. Starts at 8 pm Eastern. There's also a TV station in New Hampshire airing it, as well as the exciting Bloomberg Channel for those of you with satellite dishes and 500 channels at the ready.
And it's taking place around this:
King Arthur could not be reached for comment.
From a technical standpoint, this looks kind of dicey. They'll have to have a cameraman straight across almost every candidate or the angles are going to make the person directly in front the camera appear like they're at the head of the table, and anyone shot at an angle is going to look like a subordinate.
And sitting down isn't what contenders usually do when they're trying to oust the usurper behind the throne. It'll make them all look subordinate to the guy in the Big House. Which, given that the Post is a liberal tabloid rag, is probably the intention.
That's also indicative as to the type of questions that will be posed. Look for the moderators to keep them fighting among themselves and thus keep them from mentioning a certain White House resident by name.
What they want is for the viewer to order the candidates in their least liked order. You least like one candidate more than the others, then move up the list to the candidate you least like the least. So you guess you'll vote for him or her, but only until they do or say something else that the MSM points out as demonstrably unlikeable, in which case you might just vote for that nice Mr. Obama, since at least you know where he stands on things.
Or, just as likely, because people don't like voting for 'lessers of evil', you just stay home.
Mission: Accomplished.
I'll report in tomorrow on this mess. There might be an unanticipated effect from having the candidates sitting, rather than standing. They might appear more 'businesslike', which, given the dire straits our economy is in, might come across as a real plus. It might give it more of a 'boardroom atmosphere'. We'll see.
