https://www.theepochtimes.com/opinion/that-second-gop-debate-was-a-disaster-5500287That Second GOP Debate Was a Disasterby Jeffrey A. Tucker
9/28/2023
Excerpts:After the disastrously idiocratic GOP debate on Wednesday night—like a fool, I stayed up late to watch it—Ron DeSantis sat down with Sean Hannity of Fox.
“If I was at home watching that,” Mr. DeSantis said, “I would have changed the channel.”
Exactly. If just one candidate has said the following, that candidate would have been the winner.
“Before I attempt to answer your canned and superficial question, let me say this. This format is awful. These questions have so far been hackneyed and scripted. The time limits seem designed to generate clips for social media and nothing more. Your games with the microphones are annoying. This great country is falling apart, and Fox seems to be running the circuses. This is not serious. Our nation is in the midst of a real emergency. The American people deserve better.”
That would have been the night’s takeaway. It is also what every single viewer was thinking. There is no one who spent two hours watching that mess who didn’t feel robbed. Not one salient point emerged from it. Fox got its advertisements in, mercifully free of pharma, but that is all. It was otherwise a complete waste.
Mr. Trump was the only winner.
The format and question content alone was stunning, almost jaw-dropping. The point seemed to be to run a before-times debate of the old sort. This is why so many questions seemed lifted from the reject pile from 2012. One moderator even posed as a representative of the Latino community—complete with a thick accent—and asked questions almost exclusively about that subject, which only reinforces the very identity politics that is ripping the country apart.
There was no mention of the CDC, the CIA, the FBI, the decaying standard of living as a result of Washington’s mismanagement, the censorship, the fall of American cities, lockdowns, or any other elements of hard-core reality. Indeed, the entire question slate seemed designed to avoid reality.
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A final note for candidates and their controllers: your approach is not working. Every one of these candidates need to be free of consultant controls, allowed to sink or swim on their own. The difference between real and fake is incredibly obvious to any viewer. Every successful public speaker knows this. You cannot engage anyone through memorized remarks and canned responses. The only way to engage is to be a real person, and that means putting an end to the fake displays of cartoon “leadership” and instead say what is on the mind of masses of voters.
People in this country today are terrified for their future. We are no longer a naive people. We are more than aware that this once-great country is being pillaged by an entrenched ruling class that is taking whatever is not nailed down, with zero regard for the future. These seem like the end times, and people are crying out for explanations and answers.
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