Immoderate thoughts about the Clinton-Obama debate

Watch it again. Read the transcript. It's impossible to miss what 10 million viewers noticed: ABC News' moderators, Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos, along with the national news media as a whole, were the real losers of this week's debate between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton:

[V]iewers of all political persuasions were affronted by the moderators’ failure to ask about the mortgage crisis, health care, the environment, torture, education, China policy, the pending G.I. bill to aid veterans, or the war we’re losing in Afghanistan. Those minutes were devoted not just to recycling the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Bosnian sniper fire and another lame question about a possible “dream ticket” but to the unseemly number of intrusive commercials and network promos that prompted the jeering at the end. The trashiest ads often bumped directly into an ABC announcer’s periodic recitations of quotations from the Constitution. Such defacing of American values is to be expected, I guess, from a network whose debate moderators refuse to wear flag pins.

Kudos to Frank Rich of the New York Times for this succinct evaluation of the disastrous debate. For some comic relief, read Obsidian Wings' parody.

Update, April 20, 2008

As reported by the Washington Post:

[I]n Crown Point, [Indiana,] a town 25 miles from Gary, the New York senator downed a shot of Crown Royal whiskey, had a beer and chomped down a slice of cheese pizza, as her aides rushed to fill her request for another slice, with pepperoni. The crowd at Bronko's restaurant cheered as [Hillary] Clinton clinked her glass against fellow drinkers', while at the same time the restaurant's manager told a man who brought his grandchildren to the event he needed to take them out of the room.

Comedy, tragedy, or farce? You decide.