Did anybody watch last night’s GOP presidential candidate debate on NBC? Apparently, 7.5 million people sat through it. One wonders how many people managed to keep their eyes open past the first hour.
To be fair, I was catching up on the zany antics of everyone’s favorite misanthrope doctor on "House” (Spoiler Alert: Crotchety title character says rude things to people) so I missed the first hour of the debate. Once I got around to Brian Williams & Co.’s turgid after-school detention session cleverly masquerading itself as a debate, within a minute it was clear something was up. Turns out that NBC made applause verboten within the auditorium. What should’ve been ‘Newt v. Mitt-Thunderdome’ morphed into a Lunesta-enhanced quaalude-soaked Ambien-fortified paint-drying observation session. With socialists as the hosts. By the time Mitt or Newt or Santorum or whoever started talking about self-deportation–I was starting to get drowsy, so the memory is hazy–I was wishing I could self-deport myself to a time when I didn’t know NBC was holding their shitty debate.
I saw no questions about Solyndra, Fast-n-Furious or the looming collapse of the Eurozone. So of course the candidates had to answer a question about Terri Schiavo. Apparently America has so few pressing problems that we have to go back seven years to find trouble.
Naturally, I did a fair amount of pissing and moaning about this on Twitter. Because whining about stuff always helps, right? Leave it up to the professionals at Hot Air to actually try to do something about it.
Last night, my friend Peter Ingemi expressed his dissatisfaction with the NBC
debate — and the presidential debates in general — by proposing that Hot Air run
a Republican primary debate, moderated by yours truly. Peter says he’s “dead
serious” about this:Just watched yet another GOP debate and was totally unamazed by the lack of questions on fast and furious and BS questions such as: “Why did the Bush Tax Cuts fail?”. I think political types are sick of questions from people who want the GOP to fail.
I have a solution:I suggest Hotair send an invitation to each candidate for a 2 hour debate moderated by Ed Morrissey.
This got quite a response on Twitter last night and this morning. It even has
its own hashtag, #hotairdebate, and it’s been endorsed by the Boss Emeritus,
Senate primary candidate Jamie Radtke, and a number of bloggers. It even got an
Instapundit endorsement, who said the proposal “sounds like a winner.”
Sounds like a winner to me too.
For those of you who have teh Twitterz, I say we all tweet Mitt, Newt, Santorum and Paul’s Twitter accounts asking them–politely–if they could take part in a Hot Air debate. Hashtag the message with #hotairdebate. Lather, rinse, repeat for a good long while until somebody responds.
If they say yes, fine. If they say no, ask for an explanation. I mean, why would the GOP nominees allow themselves to be hammered by the raft of CNN/ABC/CBS/NBC lefty hack reporters, yet not take part in a debate at Hot Air?
Every single one of these candidates professes his fidelity to American conservatism. They seek the nomination of a party that advertises itself as a right-leaning caucus. All four of these men should jump at the chance to defend their records, define their ideas and make the case for their campaigns in front
of a Hot Air audience.
Conservatives are rightfully annoyed by the debates. They’ve been run by liberals and for liberals. A Hot Air debate would do much to rectify the MSM bias in this primary season.
