Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Friday, October 30, 2015

Epistemoligical Closure

GOP won't go back on NBC.

The moderators were poorly prepared, but they didn't ask bad questions.  Carson's activities on behalf of a quack snake oil company is a legitimate question.  Rubio's finances are a legitimate question.

And the bizarre, half baked tax plans that constitutes GOP orthodoxy absolutely deserve tough questions.  The more the GOP walls themselves off from contrary viewpoints, the less they will be able to reach any Americans who don't already mainline their "news" from Fox.

Josh Marshall nails it:

As you see, the RNC has now expelled NBC News from the Republican debate schedule. If I don't say so myself, I think my comparison to the Boehner drama was more prescient than I realized. There has to be someone betraying them or some new outrage to feed the machine. With Obama fading into history, with the 'establishment's' candidate vanquished, now it's NBC News. You get a sense of where this is going that Ted Cruz says that Limbaugh or Hannity should moderate the debates. To be clear, this isn't about whether the debate was good or bad or whether axing NBC is fair or not. (I said the debate was a mess while it was happening.) In the grandest sense, who cares? It's just that the entire drama and whine-a-thon is ridiculous. This is their new big issue? Like I said, the outrage needs a target. Who's betraying them now. The pattern takes over everything.

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