The Response, part 2

“Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” These are the words of a much greater man than I. These are the words I wish would have come first to my mind. But whereas Ms Pirro’s words come with the rapidity of the gut reaction, Dr King’s words come only from those long pauses of silent reflection, from the heart and from the mind. This is the strategy, and it’s no wonder why we so quickly push it away or find any excuse to ignore it. If you fully take in what these words mean in context it cuts you deep to your soul. To lash out in anger seems justified, it seems cathartic, it seems like it will work, but vengeance doesn’t work like that. To respond with love in these circumstances can feel like pressing a knife into your own gut, because it is so much harder. And because it is so much harder, it actually works.

Now, I’m not saying we will let ISIS get away, and I’m not saying that we should put away the sword, but I am saying when our enemy needs us to hate and to be afraid of them to the point where we cannot see who they are, then our first duty is to love and to have courage and to seek knowledge. France was not attacked by refugees. Germany is now famous for welcoming so many refugees and yet it was not Berlin that was attacked. By the best reports that I’ve seen, the people who perpetrated the attacks were young men who had lived at least a majority of their lives in Europe, one of whom stole a identification documents to pass himself off as a refugee. These were young men who saw societies that feared and hated them, if not in active shouts of hate then in social and economic policy. These were young men who saw their families struggle to find any meaningful work, who saw the grand culture and prosperity of Europe through the lens of the banlieue, who saw the hijab banned, who saw nationalist parties gaining support with threats of deporting and ending immigration. These were young men who heard clerics claim to feel their plight, who heard a message of redemption and revenge, who heard of a way to finally be a part of a community when they had for so long simply been apart from society.

We want to believe that empathy will not work in this regard, because when faced with the deaths of innocents we want to see blood paid for with blood. We want an excuse to be able to use harsh measures to end it once and for all, but that only stokes the flames of hatred. Any “solution” that responds in kind to these attacks is destined only to elicit even more violence in the future. If this weren’t true, then why would we be tempted to fight back in the first place? As much as they do inhuman things, they too are human and follow the same human tendencies we all do, and more importantly so too do the people we uncharitably refer to as collateral damage.

I do not doubt that the US military, the combined forces of NATO have the power to kill every last member of ISIS. I do doubt that by killing these individuals you could do so without killing innocent bystanders. Even if that too were possible, I find it impossible that this would not also leave behind grieving widows, children, etc; all of whom would be filled with the same desire for revenge that we feel now, creating the next generation of terrorists. But I am not a pacifist, as much as there is a part of me that wishes I could be. We cannot allow ISIS and their ilk to go on killing innocent people. Therefore the only workable solution I can see is to ensure that as many people who surround these combatants see the West as targeting ISIS and not Islam; as targeting terrorists, and not civilians; as giving protection to the people, and not simply destroying their homes.

To convince them, that is precisely what we must do; it is the path of love and that is why it is clearly so abhorrent when our nature is to feel hate in these times. Many governors are declaring that they will not accept any refugees, many people fear an influx of Muslims, and many presidential candidates are feeding on the fear and the hate to advocate for the kinds of policies that should have already made humanity deeply ashamed. We can ill afford to give into our worst demons, telling us to build up walls around the country, to build walls around the Muslims, to ban mosques, and treat human beings as packages to be endlessly monitored until they get to some destination far from us. We must listen to our better angels, telling us to welcome those who’ve been driven from their homes, to embrace those who know first hand what horrors terrorists can inflict, to join with so many other countries who see the same fear that had driven people from their homes in World Wars passed.

We do indeed need to fight ISIS in the literal sense, but we will only be sending our own troops to die if we are not also fighting them on the ideological battlefield. They know that they cannot win the fight for hearts and minds, which is why they must back up their edicts with the threat of beheading or worse. We are the country that has long endured as the symbol of a second chance, of hope, and I would not so easily give that responsibility away. And it is a responsibility, one that we take too lightly if we are so readily convinced by clowns to throw it away by throwing up walls. It is a privilege to live in a country that people run to in times of persecution, it is after all our founding ethos, and to redeem our heritage we have to fight the urge of so many ordinary countries that try to fight change. We embrace change in America, we embrace innovation, we embrace the melting pot where all are welcome to contribute to the expanding definition of what it means to be an American. It is our diversity, our hospitality, our dedication to liberty that will actually win this fight and not simply bullets or bombs.

It is the ambition of ISIS to crush any and all dissent, it is our prerogative to support dissent. Too many people and certainly too many politicians have gotten away with claiming that throwing arms at the problem will solve anything. They come up with supposed solutions that involve setting up a no fly zone and arming opposition groups and working in conjunction with the Kurds, but to what end? There is no clear evidence that ISIS is able to actually put any fighters in the air at this point, but sure a no fly zone sounds like the kind of thing a military leader would say. We’ve spent tons of money on arming opposition groups with nearly no success, but certainly that sounds impressive. Kurdish forces have proven themselves in their defense of land that they control, and even though there’s no indication that they have the means or desire to start invading ISIS claimed territory, it still sounds intelligent enough to be a solution, right? Well, I don’t doubt that any of these things could potentially contribute to a strategy that wins the conflict, but they are not enough to make sure we don’t end up fighting even more combatants we just happened to have armed during this conflict.

Our job is to first be a guiding force in a movement that gives a positive choice for the Syrians and Iraqis and everyone else bogged down in this conflict. To do that we need to be crystal clear that as a secular nation our goal is to defend the religious rights of all people, Muslims not least of all. We must back that claim up with the fortitude to actually take in the families that have been vetted for years at a time, to create a refuge for those caught in the middle of this conflict. We must further defend our position by saying proudly that as a liberal nation, we defend the liberty of all people, to live and work as they see fit, in a nation of laws that protect the innocent. Only once we’ve done that, when we’ve put away the hatred at home can we convince anyone abroad that our sword is aimed only at the terrorists, at those who are really causing the bloodshed.

We cannot give into hatred, even as we send our servicemen and women to fight or else we serve only to darken the night. Blind hate is an unfortunately natural response, but if there has been one goal of civilization it is to be better than our nature, something we keep doing generation after generation. It is difficult, as anything of value is, but we need to be able to remember who our neighbor is, at it certainly includes those fleeing persecution. The only way to redeem the losses that hit us so deeply is to enshrine their graves with love and mercy and compassion and hope.

The Response, part 1

“We need to kill them. We need to kill them: the radical Muslim terrorists, hellbent on killing us. You’re in danger, I’m in danger. We’re at war and this is not going to stop.” This is how Jeanine Pirro decided to start her show in the wake of the terrorist attack in Paris… in January.  I don’t know how well this will be remembered by a larger audience, and if you feel like watching her full statement feel free to Google those first five words, but it really made an impression on me. I hadn’t realized just how much of an impression until just a couple of days ago when I was mulling over what I thought the US response should be to the attacks in Paris and in Beirut and over Egypt and in Syria, Iraq, Libya and everywhere else that has suffered at the hands of the group known widely as ISIS. I understand the response too well, I wanted to take off the kid gloves and send American troops to wipe out this group that has made so many hearts ache, left so many empty chairs at tables around the world, caused so many parents and children alike to grieve. For more than a fleeting moment I too wanted to just kill them all and make sure that they could never again lay a finger on innocent people.

I thought of how simple it would be to wipe out the few thousand people out there who claim to support this horrific organization, and how much better the world would be if we stopped with the half measures and really let loose so that we might never have to do it again. I imagined how easy it would be for the president to ask for a clear declaration of war from Congress, to single out ISIS and once they are wiped out to be able to say we’ve ended it. And I paused and I took a few deep breaths and then I asked the all important question that never gets asked, “what’s the endgame?” It’s a very simple question, but there isn’t anywhere close to a simple answer.  We’re not talking about driving Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait and leaving a more or less developed state to take care of the mess. We’re not even talking about the reestablishment of Iraq under an American led local democracy. We’re talking about at least two existing countries(Syria and Iraq), at least five different nations(Kurdistan, Arab Sunnis, Alawites, Shiites more broadly, and the remaining Christian groups). Amid all those groups there are two existing leaders(Assad’s Syrian government and al-Abadi’s Iraqi government), not to mention the various de facto leaders of these groups and outside influences like Iran, Turkey, Russia, and finally the US. What’s the endgame?

We’re reacting like wounded animals, because ultimately we are. We are deeply wounded from years of seeing innocent people die to the point that we are usually able to ignore the ones that happen on a daily basis.  It took something as extreme as the attacks on Paris to again make the eyes of the world see just how deep the scars are. And like the evolved animals we are we reacted in harsh ways: calling in airstrikes, closing borders, denying refugees, turning against each other. Not to simply spout off a glib cliche, but if we continue to do this the terrorists win. That’s what they are, they’re terrorists. They’re not soldiers, their not freedom fighters, they are terrorists and their job is to inflict terror, the likes of which cause us to act like animals and tear at each other. They feed on this terror because it allows them to control the narrative of who is us and who is them, pardon the bad grammar. So who are they?

At this point I have to demand a certain amount of diligence from the reader because what comes next needs to be read in its totality and not glanced over. They, ISIS, are Muslims. They follow a strict interpretation of Sharia based on the Koran and the Hadith. However, they are not even remotely representative of all Muslims, nor even a large minority of Muslims. They’re beliefs are as narrow-minded, bigoted, inhuman, and despicable as one could imagine, which is why many of us who have Muslim friends find it impossible to square the circle of how they can all claim to be following the same religion.  The easy way to try and understand it is to compare them to the KKK, which is still a deeply Christian organization and in no way representative of even a tiny minority of all Christians in the world. This is true, but I think that this comparison is insufficient to explain the psychology of how these groups gain support.

In America, before we heard about the attacks, one of the annoying culture wars going on had to do with Christmas, Starbucks, and a red cup. Everyone got so hot and bothered both on the side of people who were offended about Starbucks’s decision concerning their holiday cup design, and even more so the backlash of people who wanted to endlessly mock the people who got agitated in the first place. The result was two sides, us vs them, and either you were one of the Christian wackos who hated Starbucks or else you were with the far superior crowd mocking them and there could be no middle ground.  This put a lot of Christians in a bit of an odd predicament. Clearly they too believed that the original agitators were wrong in the sense that this was a meaningless thing to get upset about, but all many people could hear was the endless mockery of these Christian extremists, which all too often became general attacks at Christians of all stripes. In that situation the mocking side didn’t make any new converts and likely pushed those on the fence into the hands of the community that claims to share their values.

In Germany, after the First World War, the economy sunk and inflation ran rampant. The current economic policy of Germany is still shadowed by the memories of currency becoming worthless overnight to the point where wheelbarrows full of money couldn’t buy a loaf of bread, making the paper itself more useful as wallpaper. In that setting a group that prided itself in getting people work, food, support, etc could do rather well for itself. The Nazi Party filled that niche with soup kitchens and massive public works projects. All the while they too fueled the narrative that this was what Germans did for other Germans in defense against a whole host of others. If you didn’t catch it, that’s where the jump is made from Nazis to Germans.  The Nazis are not, were not, never were representative of the German people as a whole but by push and by pull they forced the whole world to believe that lie.  The Nazi Party was indeed made up of Germans but it never won an outright majority in the Reichstag, yet take power they did and continue to tell the lie that they were the real Germans to make any Germans on the fence see outside forces from Jews to the Allies as the anti-German forces.

This is what we’re facing today. A group with no legitimacy slowly and methodically driving a narrative claiming that because they are a Muslim group they can therefore hold authority over all Muslims, that they are the group other Muslims can turn to when the Western world turns on them. Like the Nazis they make sure the price of bread remains affordable for its subjects and claims to be defending their people from threats from within and without. Like the Christian groups at home, we are then feeding into their narrative by acting like an antagonistic force to Muslims. A majority of governors have now said that they will not accept any Syrian refugees, despite the clear Constitutional authority the president has to completely ignore that. And all the while ISIS, even as it kills countless Muslims, gets to portray itself as the defender of Muslims. This is the endgame if we continue to fight this conflict as we have done and as we want to do. The only thing that will change is that likely there will be a new name, perhaps a new anagram.

The Taliban did the exact same thing in Afghanistan. They protected the poppy farmers and claimed to be defending Afghans from the Soviets and then the Americans, and they’re still around today. By giving into our worst nature we let them win, because we’re not fighting a state, we’re not fighting another military, we’re fighting a hydra that only grows as we try to cut it down. So what’s to be done? What can we do other than fight them there? If we don’t fight them there, then they go unopposed and we may yet have to fight them here seems to be the logic of the day. But this is all based on the unfounded solution that this is a fight we can win by fighting fire with fire. We could defeat the Nazis with a military because we knew for certain it was the Nazis, and not the German people, we were defeating. That way when we were done with the Nazis there was a Germany in place to fill the vacuum. We don’t have such a Syria or Iraq or even a Kurdistan at this point.  So what?

Intellectual Entitlement

“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”  This should be the starting ground to any reasonable discussion.  It really should not be too much to ask that an individual try to back up his or her opinions with facts from this reality and not from the reality that exists only in one’s gut, or to put it another way about a foot up one’s ass.  There’s nothing wrong, in principle, with following your gut instinct.  After all, that very instinct developed after countless generations of our ancestors who needed to form sufficiently accurate conclusions in short order, if for no other reason than to avoid the stalking predator in the tall grass for a few more moments.  However, that gut instinct is frequently wrong and certainly insufficient to being the basis of any meaningful policy.  We can all feel deep down that what we believe is right, but if you can’t back up the position with anything more meaningful and all the evidence runs in the opposite direction, I’m more inclined to trust my eyes than your gut.

To everyone who had to endure the most recent Republican debate, you have my sympathy; and to the people responsible for the production of Tylenol, you have my thanks.  Amid the shouting, the personal insults, and the completely ignored time bell, there were many things said and to go through all of it would be a nearly insurmountable task.  These debates really are just a two-hour long Gish gallop, as huge numbers of claims are made without any substantiating evidence and without ever being challenged by the moderators, which means that a person who wants to adequately address all the falsehoods and half-truths would be spending the better part of a week doing so.  We all had a good laugh at the Texan who simply cannot remember all of the federal departments he wants to get rid of.  Almost makes you nostalgic when it was only three on the chopping block.  Even some of the smarter people on stage couldn’t quite bear the full extent of Donald Trump’s ridiculousness, but there was no one up there who could refrain from alluding to other universes where they were making reasonable arguments.

One major problem was with attacks on Democrats, liberals, progressives, etc.  Most of the claims in this regard were outright untrue, and of those that were true, they weren’t attacks.  What do I mean by that?  Well, I could look at a woman who gave a dollar to a homeless man with a very stern glance and tell her in a menacing tone that she’s very generous.  Tone aside, it’s not an insult.  Similarly, I’ve never understood how the GOP hasn’t ever been laughed off the stage every time they claim that the Democrats want to insure everyone, they want everyone to go to college, they want everyone to have a job that pays enough that they don’t need government assistance as if those were insults.  All of these things are both true and not in the least insulting, because this is what a decent human being wants, in general, for people.  I will say that not everyone needs to go to a liberal arts college or that every adult needs to seek out a full time job, but the pursuit of a better world where people actually get the choice is a reasonable and worthwhile goal.  I do want everyone to have access to healthcare without first worrying if going to a cancer treatment center will put them under.  That didn’t strike me as a radical political position until I started listening to the GOP.

There would be an argument if you could prove that national healthcare systems result in worse outcomes for patients at a higher cost, but in the real world the opposite is true.  Most developed countries, and even some developing countries, experience better healthcare outcomes than we do and all of them do so at a fraction of the cost precisely because the system isn’t set up to pin one patient against the entire healthcare industry.  Which brings us back from the realm of half-truth and back to the pure falsehoods.  In a manner that echoes ‘1984,’ the GOP seems able to go from saying we’re at war with Eurasia and that we’ve always been at war with East Asia mid-sentence.  In the case of this debate, I’m referring to the question posed by the moderators asking the eight Republicans why Americans should trust them with the economy, when Democratic presidents have a much better record at fighting the debt, increasing employment, and growing the GDP.  Rand Paul chose to “answer” the question by saying flatly that the areas with Democratic governors and mayors are poorer and less equal than areas with Republican governors and mayors.

Right off the top, I’m tempted to ask Senator Paul if he’s planning on running for governor or mayor, because if not that’s something of a non-sequitur for a Republican presidential candidate.  But even that would leave in place his premise that the parts of the country led by Republicans are more prosperous, more egalitarian, freer, and generally just better run.  Tell that to Mississippi, West Virginia, Arkansas, Alabama, Louisiana, Tennessee, etc.  As with everything, there are exceptions, but if you look at the states that receive the most from the federal government, they tend to vote Republican, while the states that pay the most into the federal government tend to vote Democratic.  The same trends follow when you look at what the GOP has done to gut education spending and limit economic mobility, all while running up debts.  But at no time during or after his response was Senator Paul informed of what happens in the real world or pushed to respond to the actual question at hand.

But that would rather have defeated the point, because it’s not what’s actually true that matters to the GOP, but what feels true.  When Marco Rubio says that welders get paid better than philosophers, it just feels like it should be so to show those eggheads who wasted their time and money thinking.  As many other posts have demonstrated, philosophy majors tend to do very well for themselves.  That’s not my way of saying everyone should become a philosopher, the eight people on that stage proved thinking simply isn’t for everyone, and welders are certainly needed and well compensated; but the fact of the matter is that the average philosophy major will make more money in a lifetime than the average welder.

And here’s where it’s time to make an important distinction between the average Joe and the person seeking the highest office in the most powerful country in the world.  I have had unfortunately many experiences with people who clearly, and in some case proudly, have no desire to base their beliefs on reality.  They have that gut feeling that informs them that Obama is a bad president for example, and it’s no use to ask them why they think that.  In fact, in many cases just by exploring the issue in depth you risk further entrenching their position, which again is in opposition to facts, simply because human pride gets put in the mix and further digs in heels.  But worst of all is the assumption that gets made by people who think this way, which is that everyone thinks that way.

I recently talked with a guy who noticed a political poster I own and said flat out that doesn’t like President Obama and that he wishes that George W Bush was still president.  I asked him why and he said he just doesn’t trust Obama, and that he blames him for the job he lost.  Come to find out that he lost his job in 2003, under Bush.  When I pointed that out to him, he asked me for seven things I like about Obama, seven things he’s accomplished.  When I gave that answer he said “well, you know we’re just going to agree to disagree, and we’re always going to agree to disagree.”  This is disheartening to hear, because I’m always in the rather tentative position of thinking that if he had something convincing to say, if he could demonstrate why he believes what he believes, I could change my mind and agree with him.  But he clearly does think differently than me, and as disappointing as the lack of thought is, at the end of the day that’s his prerogative as an individual.  As others have put it, he has the right to be wrong, but he doesn’t have the right to be president.

When I look for a presidential candidate, I’m looking for someone who has a wealth of experience in the political arena, both in getting things done in government and in pursuing effective policy.  But there is no amount of experience that can adequately prepare a person to do the job of president, so I’m also looking for someone with the intellectual fluidity and humility to accept that they don’t know everything yet to try and fill the gaps.  I don’t see that on the Right, I haven’t seen it for a long time.  They have devolved into a party of intellectual entitlement, assuming that the standards for the normal guy apply to them, and that the pursuit of anything more is elitism.  They’ve become entitled to their point of view because for too long there hasn’t been anyone to call them out, and until someone does we’re just going to suffer through these debates and hope the ensuing headache isn’t overwhelming.

Home Team Disadvantage

So it’s that time again, time to gear up for yet another in the series of bizarre spectacles that is generously referred to as the Republican Debates.  We’ve seen that in practice these multi-ring circuses are the political equivalent of the Jerry Springer show, with only slightly more denial of personal responsibility.  The ridiculousness of it all hit particularly hard at the moments when, in complete obliviousness to reality, the candidates claimed that what we all experienced was a demonstration of a civil debate, and more fundamentally that the problem was with a lack of conservative voices from behind the moderators desk.  The common, for lack of a better term, wisdom that has since come out of these debates is that what is needed are real conservative moderators, people who proudly admit to having voted in a Republican primary.  Like damn near everything that was spewed from that stage in Colorado, and in all likelihood will be spewed from Wisconsin, this is about as far from correct as possible.

First of all let’s dismantle the premise of the accusation, that being the moderators have been insufficiently conservative and altogether antagonistic to the Republicans on stage.  The CBNC debate had several issues, not least of all is the continued problem of having so many candidates on stage at one time for such a comparably brief amount of time.  In the recent Democratic Forum in South Carolina, the three remaining candidates spoke for a collective one hour and forty minutes.  The GOP debates have had to cram in an additional seven candidates into a time slot just twenty minutes longer.  The result is, at best, the kind of hard feelings from not getting enough air time that only Jim Webb can truly appreciate.  But even if the candidates were willing to understand that basic reality, which their refusal to ever accept another three hour debate again proves they are not, the simple fact is that so many ambitious people in such an enclosed space are going to make it impossible for anything less than a brutally strict moderator to keep the semblance of order.  And therein lies the problem with the CNBC debate in particular, because they were not in fact willing to be as brutal as necessary toward the GOP.

If, by some strange quirk of fate, the debate had been hosted by MCNBC, then that charge might hold a bit more weight.  Notwithstanding the reality that the most popular show is hosted by a Republican, Joe Scarborough, MSNBC is more liberal as a whole than the other mainstream networks.  CNBC, however, is a financial news network that has more sympathy to conservative policies than the average network.  The pre-debate commentary was filled with conservative commentators from the network talking excitedly about what they hoped their favorite candidates would talk about.  The only times that questions were posed in a less than straightforward manner were when they were directed at candidates who prove by word and deed that they have no business running for middle school president, much less commander in chief of the United States of America.  Of course from my position that description is perfectly fitting of all the people on the stage, but I am a little biased, so I take my cues from Fox News.

And this is the integral point that none of them seemed to grasp.  The questions posed to them were comparably kind and on point in comparison to the first debate, which was hosted by… Fox News.  It wasn’t CNBC that asked Donald Trump repeated questions to point out that he has said truly despicable things about women, about immigrants, etc.  For weeks after the fact, these same babies cried about how they were mistreated by Megyn Kelly, who to her credit did an admirable job with what she was given.  One can only hope that with only eight candidates to handle, the next biased network can handle the animus of all these GOP candidates.  Who’s hosting the next debate again? Oh yeah, Fox Business.  This network draws from a lot of the same personalities for their segments as CNBC, which ultimately is true of almost all networks, regardless of their political swing.  Ben Carson got into a bit of a spat with Alisyn Camerota, who currently works for CNN but as he noted used to work for Fox News.  No, in all of these situations the problem hasn’t been that the GOP has been subject to insufficiently conservative venues, the opposite is actually far closer to the truth.

For too long, so many of these ultra-conservative talking head candidates have been taken into the loving arms of the farthest-Right venues where even kid gloves would be too abrasive.  Not one of them is used to being called out by Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Glenn Beck, etc when they espouse policies that don’t work on paper, much less in reality.  The point in any of those interviews, before they were running for president, had simply been to attack liberals while pondering how much better the world would be if only they had the power to do what they wanted.  Nobody is going to stop a couple of guys pondering how to fix the world as they drink a couple beers after work, but when those policies have even a slight chance of being put in place, it becomes time to actually question their efficacy, or in the case of this lot, their sanity.

Which brings me to the patron saint of the CNBC debate, Ted Cruz.  Mr Cruz is thoroughly un-American.  I say that not because he wasn’t born in the US or because his father is Cuban, because everyone who chooses America, who works and pays taxes and lives and loves in the US is, in my book, a true America.  It’s not even his more than passing resemblance to a man who headed an un-American House Committee, it’s that Mr Cruz seems to think that the purpose of a primary is to find out which candidate is the most ideologically extreme and put them forward.  No, the purpose of a primary is for each party to choose a candidate who can best represent All Americans.  This is not to say that the goal of a primary is to pick the most moderate candidate or the most establishment candidate or anything like that.  The goal of a primary is to give the major parties their opportunity to see who they think is best able to win the support of as many Americans as possible, so he or she can earn the mantle of the highest elected position.  That could be a conservative, as was the case for Ronald Reagan; it could be a liberal, as was the case for FDR; and it could certainly be a moderate like George HW Bush; however, the point is not to put your party in a bubble that is utterly isolated from the rest of the country and then expect that the whole country could possibly be represented by what eventually comes out.

If for no other reason than to avoid the problem that has so often plagued the GOP of running as far to the extreme as possible in the primary, only to have to try and convince people that you are much more moderate in the general election, the goal cannot be to enforce the walls of the ideological bubble.  The Democrats, for their many weaknesses, clearly understand this and are willing and able to put up with tough questions that they would face in a general election.  Far from being several hours of foot-rubbings and sweet nothings, the Democratic contests have been filled with tough questions.  Bernie Sanders has constantly been faced with questions about his viability, about the realistic possibility of Americans actually being willing to vote for an avowed Democratic Socialist, and also about how his record on guns stacks up in a crowd of Democrats that want to more heavily regulate guns.  Hillary Clinton has had to answer questions about her emails, about the shifting positions she’s held since the 90s, her place in the shadows of two presidencies, etc.  Martin O’Malley was confronted with accusations that it was his direct governance in Baltimore specifically and Maryland more broadly that has led to many of the socio-economic problems he now wants to tackle.  These are all tough questions, but because they’re adults, they answer the questions and show Americans that they are willing able to suffer through even eleven hours of opposition at a time.

There was no equivalent of Hugh Hewitt on the Democrat’s CNN debate, what they got was a series of questions from journalists who work very hard to make their political ideology incidental to their reporting as possible.  None of this being a love letter to the modern media landscape, by any stretch.  The sensationalist tendencies of the mainstream media are a real problem that needs to be faced, but it has nothing to do with the inability of the whole crowd of GOP candidates to answer any question more difficult than “nice weather we’ve been having, isn’t it?”  No, the problem has been and continues to be the total detachment from reality that plagues the modern Republican Party.  If they continue to refuse to deal with truth, facts, the real world, etc then it won’t matter if the Gipper himself rises from the grave and concludes each of his questions with an offer of jellybeans.  The GOP will just continue to suffer from their own self-indulgence, like a Meth addict who sees his teeth falling out and blames his toothbrush for knocking them out.