What a missed opportunity. What a stupid line of questioning for a Presidential Debate.
You two gentlemen were in the enviable position of asking questions of two of the most intriguing political minds in this country, and you played like children.
I defer to Will Bunch, journalist from Philadelphia, on this one. In An open letter to Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos, he says everything I felt:
With your performance tonight — your focus on issues that were at best trivial wastes of valuable airtime and at worst restatements of right-wing falsehoods, punctuated by inane “issue” questions that in no way resembled the real world concerns of American voters — you disgraced my profession of journalism, and, by association, me and a lot of hard-working colleagues who do still try to ferret out the truth, rather than worry about who can give us the best deal on our capital gains taxes. But it’s even worse than that. By so badly botching arguably the most critical debate of such an important election, in a time of both war and economic misery, you disgraced the American voters, and in fact even disgraced democracy itself. Indeed, if I were a citizen of one of those nations where America is seeking to “export democracy,” and I had watched the debate, I probably would have said, “no thank you.” Because that was no way to promote democracy.
And there’s more. Read the entire post.