At the last Republican debate, when he got booed for shushing Jeb Bush, Donald Trump turned on the audience and accused them of being special interests to whom the party had given most of the tickets and that that group did not like him because he did not need or want their money and thus they could not influence him. This made me curious as to how these audiences are picked. It clearly matters since the applause or boos that a candidate gets in response to answers can subtly influence the way that they are viewed by the TV audience and the media. In the last debate, for example, Marco Rubio got booed quite lustily, something that I had not seen before.
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On Bill Maher’s show, the feminist icon Gloria Steinem was speculating about why young people, and young women in particular, were so solidly behind Bernie Sanders instead of Hillary Clinton and she said something that surprised me.
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As could have been predicted, Twitter exploded with reactions to Marco Rubio’s bizarre performance during last night’s debate and he took a major beating. The reviews focused heavily on his penchant for robotic answers that went amuck last night. Here is one set of Tweets and here is another .
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I decided to tune in at least to part of the eighth Republican primary debate and see what fun there was to be had and I was glad that I did so. It was a rollicking affair. Almost completely substance free, of course, but great fun nonetheless.
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It was interesting to read reports of the recent back-and-forth between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton as to who is a real progressive, with both claiming the label. It was not long ago that Republicans had managed to so damage the label of even the perfectly honorable political tradition of liberalism that leaders of the Democratic party shied away from it, and veered into the so-called ‘third way’ neoliberalism policies that they would describe as centrism or moderate or some such euphemism.
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One of the excuses that the Obama administration and its Department of Justice have given for the lenient way that they have treated the corporate sector and its top executives despite the clear evidence of fraud is that prosecuting them is hard and has a low chance of success.
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I have decided to take a break from watching the debates and town halls held by the Democratic and Republican candidates. I started watching the Democratic town hall on Wednesday but soon got tired of it. I think it is because as a fairly close observer of politics, I am not learning anything new about the candidates’ views from these events. I think I pretty much know where they stand so watching would be largely for style not substance and I am not that interested in style. I figure that if they say something really new or interesting, I will hear or read about it elsewhere.
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