I wasn’t sure what to expect facing off against conservative uber-strategist Grover Norquist Monday night at the invitation of the Evergreen Freedom Foundation (EFF), but I was game to find out. It was essentially a no lose situation for me, a lowly local blogger debating a national figure like Norquist. This was a debate that I would win even by losing, elevating my prominence by association, while inherently lowering his.
Indeed, when I first posted that I would be debating Norquist, at an Outback Steakhouse of all places, several readers just assumed I was joking. I wasn’t. My how the mighty have fallen.
The evening started off in a surreal fashion, exchanging friendly handshakes with Norquist, one of the criminal masterminds of the vast right-wing conspiracy, and Washington State Republican Party chair Luke Esser, a man I once facetiously accused of “fucking pigs.” Pleasantries completed I vigorously washed my hands before proceeding to dinner, where I was seated at the end of a table with Norquist, Seattle Times editorial columnist Bruce Ramsey, and EFF president Bob Williams, an outspoken advocate of settling policy disputes by taking political prisoners. You know… my homies.
Having never been to an Outback Steakhouse before, I of course ordered the salmon, as did Norquist. (Ramsey, the dirty fucking hippie, ordered the vegetarian pasta. What’s up with that?) As the VIP crowd of EFF faithful munched on cheese fries and Outback’s signature “Bloomin’ Onion” (Australian for “onion rings”), Ramsey conducted an informal interview with Norquist, and, well, how could I not listen in?
McCain’s VP choice? Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal. Norquist says Jindal has more experience than Obama, yet at 38 years old beats him in youth (and I suppose, brownness.) As for McCain himself, Norquist argues that he isn’t in as bad a position as many pundits think, down only a few points to Obama, while by comparison, Dukakis led Bush I by 17 points in August of 1988. (Note to Norquist… this isn’t 1988.)
Norquist also expounded on the electoral advantages of his vaunted conservative coalition versus the relative chaos of the fractured hoards on the left. (Note to Norquist… this isn’t 2004.)
As dinner was served, Norquist stood to say a few words to the pre-debate crowd, and while he may have been eating fish and broccoli himself, he tossed plenty of red meat to the rhetorically ravenous EFFers; in fact, until that moment, I had never realized how incredibly evil I and my fellow travelers are… at least in the paranoid fantasies Norquist peddles to the true believers. Sure, I’ve grown accustomed to the usual assortment of trolls, talk monkeys and (u)SPers attributing our ideological opposition to stupidity or lunacy or both, but according to Norquist, we’re not just wrong, we’re downright bad people… “competing parasites” and “child killers” motivated solely by greed, envy and actual malice. And that’s just the rhetorical poo he flings at public school teachers.
In preparing for the debate I had struggled to settle upon a stylistic approach… wonky? Passionate? Sarcastic? But through his pre-debate remarks Norquist had set a combative tone, and I was only too happy to follow his lead.
Michael and Lee have posted their own review of the proceedings, as has Ramsey, and lost in the moment, I’m incapable of providing a better blow by blow account. I’ve no idea if I won or lost on points, but that was never my focus; my goal was to back Norquist into a rhetorical corner, and on the issue of school vouchers he gave me the opportunity I’d been looking for. Borrowing a technique I’d honed during my encounters with Tim Eyman, I disintermediated the moderator and posed a question directly to Norquist, asking him to explain why spending tax dollars on education, even vouchers, is at all consistent with his philosophy of limited government?
As expected, Norquist refused to answer the question, skillfully changing the subject to his own advantage, but I did not demur, instead rephrasing my question to ask him why it was appropriate for government to force me to pay to educate another family’s child, but not to provide that child health care? And again, he refused to answer my question.
Round and round we went, me relentlessly following up, and Norquist refusing to answer, his responses growing ever longer and repetitive as he all but filibustered the remaining minutes. Afterwards, Ramsey came up to me and said, “He never answered your question,” to which I replied, “That’s because we all know the answer.”
Of course, public education, vouchers or otherwise, is not consistent with Norquist’s philosophy of limited government, and he knows it. Norquist could not possibly reconcile spending tax dollars on school vouchers with his ideologically rigid “small government” framework, yet if he conceded the point it would reveal his advocacy for vouchers to be cynical and manipulative. It would also be extremely unpopular with voters, who overwhelmingly support education spending. Norquist supports vouchers as a calculated step toward initially reducing government education spending, and eventually eliminating it. And that is why I oppose them.
But my ultimate point was that on this, as on so many other issues, Norquist is fundamentally dishonest. Oh, he’s brutally frank when it comes to discussing strategy, but his comments both before and during the debate were peppered with intentionally misleading and factually incorrect statements. For example, when Norquist argues that Obama would raise the capital gains tax, thus raising taxes on tens of millions of middle class Americans who own 401K plans, he neglects to mention that 401Ks are tax exempt, and that the profits are only taxed when the money is withdrawn during retirement, when one’s income is generally lower. And yet it is on bogus assertions like this that he vilifies the opposition. And “vilify” is no overstatement: there is an underlying violence to his metaphors that seems to come from the heart.
The truth is, there was no debate Monday night, and there wouldn’t have been regardless of the tact I’d chosen. (Reading Ramsey’s comments on his Times blog, a debate between me and him would have been more challenging and engaging.) Norquist came to plug his book, and was unwilling or unprepared to reach beyond his familiar talking points, regardless of the question… in the end, it wasn’t much different than taking on Eyman. No doubt with a little effort Norquist would have proven a more formidable foe, but given his reputation as a political genius, I didn’t really find him all that.
I guess I expected a little better.
Thanks for the funny typo! I chuckled at the thought of you “demure”-ing. It would have been no fun had you been demure around those people. It would have been okay not to demur, too. LOL
(I am sure you can be decorous and timid when you choose to be.)
Spike @1,
Yeah, well if that’s the only typo in this piece I’d be surprised. I sometimes fear I’m developing a sort of typing aphasia, often substituting entire unrelated words. It’s creepy.
Norquist’s accusations that higher capital gains taxes would hurt 401K owners is a crock of crap. Norquist either does not much about the tax laws, or is deliberately lying.
401K distributions are taxed as ordinary income when they are withdrawn. It does not matter whether the increase in value came from dividends or capital gains. 401K’s tend to be attractive, since contributions come from pre-tax income (i.e. the money is not taxed when it is contributed) and all taxation is deferred until distribution (hopefully delayed until retirement, when tax brackets are lower and retirement money is actually needed).
Therefore, 401K owners would not be hurt in the slightest if capital gains tax rates were raised up to the same level as ordinary income taxes. The special lower capital gains rates tend to especially benefit the extremely rich, who have lots of money in regular investments, while doing nothing for the tens of millions who have almost all of their investments in their 401K plans.
Goldy you can’t expect that there is even one right-winger who actually wants an honest debate. That’s as far from what they want as Bush is from being a combat hero.
They have an ideology – not ideas. They can’t debate any real ideas because they don’t have any. Ideology yes. Talking points yes. Desire for a frank and open discussion with someone who might disagree with them? Not in a million years. Desire to actually KNOW any real facts – an abomination to the republican mind – that is.
You did right to back him into a corner, but I would have said at the outset that I realize there’s no intent on his part to actually debate. Nor were the twisted, inbred EFF fucks in attendance interested in a debate.
They wanted to consume the closest thing to Nascar food they could find, brush up on their side’s talking points, exhibit a little good-old fashioned red, white and blue hatred and then head home to their double-wides featuring even wider wives.
I hope this doesn’t happen to a member of Grover’s extended family.
http://brokenlives.info/
Norquist is no political genius. He’s just a relentless ideologue, fanatic and self-promoter.
David Brock in “Blinded by the Right” said the guy couldn’t even relax at a party. It was all business, business, business.
Norquist’s bored attitude and evasiveness is just him going through the motions while he waits for pendulum to swing back his way. He’s been there before. He obviously believes things will come around his way again.
I hope for the sake of this country, that never happens.
You know what? I’m really sick to death of all of these tightasses, that’s what.
And YLB, let’s hope the Bush II disaster disgraces the brand enough to keep these people away from the levers of power for at least a generation or two.
“The evening started off … exchanging friendly handshakes with Norquist … and Washington State Republican Party chair Luke Esser …. Pleasantries completed I vigorously washed my hands before proceeding to dinner ….”
You can’t be too careful! Salmonella is everywhere these days. You had no way of knowing how many overripe tomatoes were hidden under dinner jackets in that room.
And away we go.
|
http://www.washingtonpost.com/.....01546.html
All this talk and argument about tax cuts and tax laws. Why not just have a flat-rate tax and be done with it?
Vouchers are easy to understand: Wingers want to give our school taxes to private schools with no accountability for how the funds are spent, what the children are taught, or whether they learn. It’s the same as public education but without school boards or elections.
In other words, it’s consistent with their authoritarian, top-down, we-tell-everyone-else-what-to-do, there-will-be-no-discussion, no-dissent-will-be-tolerated, fascist mindset.
We could save a hell of a lot of money by shrinking the empire. Take Korea, for instance. Why not just excuse ourselves from the “conflict” and let the neighbors settle their own disputes? I’m sure Japan and Russia won’t be too keen on that idiot in North Korea. The Chinese will also be interested in neutralizing him. South Korea has been exporting cars and electronics to us for decades. Doesn’t that mean that they should have the wherewithal to defend themselves from a bunch of starving North Koreans?
What about our European empire? Haven’t we been in Germany long enough? After all, the Soviets gave up nearly 20 years ago.
As for the Middle East, I’ve said before it’s time to declare victory and leave.
We’ve just got too many irons in too many fires, and it’s unsustainable. What we need is a “Manhattan Project” to become totally energy and resource independent from the rest of the world. In short, we should develop a more isolationist stance, particularly when it comes to military adventures.
All this talk and argument about tax cuts and tax laws. Why not just have a flat-rate tax and be done with it?
Because the real world is more complicated than Econ 101. And the reason that our taxes are so high is because we demand government to spend money on things that are wasteful. Adjusting the tax rates will do nothing to address that problem.
Roger @ 11,
I’d sure like it if the kids came out knowing how to read, write and do simple arithmetic. I’m not sure they’re getting a very good education in those areas now.
salmon and vegi pasta is cause they doan wanna end up like timmeh.
norquist on a stage and school voucherz is all you got? that’s like ending global warming by giving out free compact fluorescent bulbz.
ramsay calls norquist “center-right.” yeah, sure bruce.
@2 It wasn’t, but I’ll never tell. =:-D
“Bout once a year or so, on special occasions and whatnot, I like to go to one of them there high-end fancy restaurants, like The Olive Garden or The Outback Steakhouse, and eat like the Queen of France eats. Weee doggie! Now that’s some gooood eatin’!”
– Tonya Harding
Lee,
Maybe one way to stop all the waste is to simplify things. I can tell you that right now the tax code is a complicated mess, benefiting accountants and tax attorneys more than the nation.
(Imagine going to school for all those years so that your sole purpose in life is filling-out government forms in such a way as to flim-flam the government for your clients. What a waste of an education. Is that what the purpose of the complicated tax laws is for? So the tax prep and legal professions can make nice livings?)
@3 Capital gains taxes are wealth concentrators. Because the rich have more investable income, more and more of the nation’s investment assets gravitate into their hands. When contemplating this, let us also not forget that all wealth is created by workers.
@6 Norquist isn’t as young as he used to be. One day his clock will run out of time. I’m just sayin’ … like the rest of us, he’s got a finite number of election cycles to look forward to.
Goldy’s really hit it on the head by pointing out that the debate was really over before it started, in that one of the supposed idealogical potentates of the New Right was reduced to debating a local blogger in a small banquet room in the back of a mediocre restaurant in Seattle. The fact that he was really here to beg people to buy his book is highly encouraging. It exposes the neocon “movement” as a small, insular but loud-mouthed group of shysters. They’ve been shouting the same snake-oil sales pitch for so long that they haven’t noticed that nobody else is listening any more.
@10 “All this talk and argument about tax cuts and tax laws. Why not just have a flat-rate tax and be done with it?”
I could go with that. Flat-rate federal income tax; business owners get the same deductions that workers do, and investors pay the same tax rate that workers do. Flat-rate state income tax; the top 20% pay the same percentage of their income to the state that the bottom 20% do. You won’t have any trouble getting me to trade our current tax system for that one.
@14 I’m under the impression that most of them do. The right’s tactic is to pluck out a failing central-city school and hold it up as representative of the entire public education system. That’s bullshit. Go to places like Mercer Island, Centralia, Deming, Waterville, Lacey, etc., and you’ll find public schools are just as good as voucher or charter schools.
On the subject of school vouchers:
I’ve never understood the right-wing insistence on school vouchers. I’ve always assumed that it’s simply an attempt to divert tax money from the public education system into private schools from which they can profit. Maybe it is that simple.
But you would have thought that they would have considered how this would ultimately play out. The wingnuts don’t want religious schools to be excluded from the program, so they expect every evangelical protestant church will open up schools which will include a bit of political indoctrination as well as religion in addition to the 3R’s.
But what about schools operated by Jewish synagogues (sp?)???? It’s public tax money, so you can’t discriminate based upon religious content, after all. Anysay, Republicans and Evangelicals support Israel, so that’s okay, too.
What about other religions? Buddist? Shinto? Reincarnationists? Muslim?
How about a school just for atheists?
How about a school for Wiccans???? Or Satan-Worshipers?
Wouldn’t they all be eligible for taxpayer-subsidized vouchers????
Like I said – I don’t think they’ve thought this one through very well.
@18 If you believe the tax code only benefits accountants and tax attorneys, you know less about it than you think.
No one pays higher tax rates than workers. That’s why I don’t work! The president and Congress don’t want me to work. They created tax disincentives for working, and tax incentives for owning! You will be punished if you work!! Therefore, I do no work and produce nothing! For this, Congress rewards me with a 2/3rds discount on my taxes, not to mention I avoid non-deductible commuting expenses and all the other non-deductible work expenses that workers have.
24 I think schools run by the Church of the Subgenius would be an absolutely wonderful idea.
Besides, Ivan Stang could probably use the money.
re 10: Would capital gains be included in your ‘flat tax rate’. If so, then I’d be in favor of it.
Many parents feel that their chid’s appearance of being an ill-tempered little half-wit is because the teachers aren’t doing a good job. A private school experience would demonstrate to the parents that what their child brings to the educational table is an an ill-temper and limited intelligence.
A massive amount of these little morons in private schools would simply replicate the problems of the public schools.
The wet dream of the neocons is to siphon vast amounts of taxpayer dollars (or better yet, taxpayer credit) to be put to the purpose turning out a Master Race of Monica Goodlings and Kevin Martins.
What’s a PRODUCER to do?
“BEAR STEARNS EXECS CIOFFI AND TANNIN ARRESTED’
Here’s what I don’t get about the schools argument: all those countries that have better schools than us, they all have public school systems, but somehow the public school system is the problem and we should abolish it?
Bruce Ramsey talks about the Columbia River dams in his column. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say Goldy talked about the dams in the debate. I want to talk about the dams, too, because their history is fascinating.
The dams, of course, were built during the New Deal by FDR. (Or, at least, the first ones were.) If you assumed they were built to generate electricity, you would be wrong. In fact, after they were built, no one knew what to do with the electricity.
The dams were built to create construction jobs during the Great Depression and to provide irrigation water to farmers. (Eastern Washington’s soil is fertile, but lies on an arid plateau and won’t grow anything without irrigation.)
Then along came World War II and a need for the dams’ electricity. It made two things of supreme strategic importance: Aluminum used in airplanes, and plutonium for atomic bombs.
Both products require vast amounts of electricity that wasn’t available anywhere else. If that unused generating capacity hadn’t been sitting there at the outbreak of war, America would have been up Shit Creek.
Consider the irony. Here you have the ultimate government welfare program: Make-work public works projects. And they end up saving our nation.
If time travel were possible, would Norquist and his hard-right fellow travelers go back to the 1930s to stop those dams from being built?
Would they choose to lose World War II as the necessary price of preventing FDR from demonstrating the usefulness of government spending?
Returning to the present, would Norquist be up to touring our state and asking customers of City Light and PUDs whether they’re willing to give up public power and pay private power rates to the likes of PSE and PGE?
Would Norquist like to ask Republican-voting eastern Washington farmers to give up the government-subsidized cheap electricity running their irrigation pumps for the sake of ideological purity? He might get an assload of buckshot for his trouble.
re 30: Let’s not forget Austan Goolsbee, the forward thinking economic guru who admires WalMart as being a model of “Progressive Free Enterprise.”
Of course Goldy brings up buddy Tim Eyman. The difference here is that Tim does, and Goldy merely spews and talks about doing. Tim has the success of passing several good initiatives, while Goldy has done nothing more that create a silly initiative to call someone a name, and be in total puppy-lust over an unqualified dizty blonde-The Darcy.
re 35: Eyeman’s not much of a political fundraiser, though. Unless the funds are for his personal use.
Administrative costs, Mark (whatever). I’m sure you know the drill.
How many people has Goldy put of work with his initiative, compared to those that your boy Timmy championed? A lot of good friends of mine, Mark, hard-working honest people, found themselves unemployed thanks to your boy. And the idiots like you that bought his shit hook, line and sinker.
What is it again that makes Burner unqualified, Mark1? It all comes down to the fact she doesn’t have a penis, doesn’t it? You’d better not run for public office, bud. We’re gonna check to see if you measure up.
@33 Roger, those are some damn provocative questions and interesting points you make in that post. I never thought about Columbia and Snake River dams in quite that way before. Thanks!
@32
Here’s what I don’t get about the schools argument: all those countries that have better schools than us, they all have public school systems, but somehow the public school system is the problem and we should abolish it?
I talked to the moderator of the event after the debate and pointed this out to him. They don’t have answers to this, just the ability to ignore it.
@33
There’s lots of dry land wheat and lentils grown in eastern WA, but corn, onions, potatoes, alfalfa (cattle/rabbit feed) and fruit, all need water. Personally, I like my peaches!
One of my great grand fathers had a small dairy farm outside of Cle Elum, when the are got electricity his farm was too far from the road to get power (Hwy 970). Without electricity he couldn’t compete with the surrounding farms and had to sell his property.
32 They also have better health care, contrary to another oft-repeated element of right-wing mythos.
35 (Yawn…)
@39
LOL…
Thanks for that.
@35 Does what? All of Eyman’s initiatives have been shot down by the courts, and every penny his supporters have invested in his initiatives has gone down a rathole, because the ignorant fuck doesn’t know how to write an initiative properly.
Or maybe he does, and is deliberately sabotaging his initiatives, and is laughing at his supporters on his way to the bank.
Lucy @ 29: Private and Public schools have always had an interesting symbiotic relationship with regards to unruly students. The public school will expell them, and the private school will promise to achieve miracles. The parent will pay the money to the private school for a while, and then when initial discipline fails, they kick the kid out of the private schools and they end up right back in the public school system.
I attended public schools all my life (1st – 12, undergraduate, and graduate), but my wife was in church schools from high school forward. She said about half of the students were there because they wanted to be, the other half were there because their parents thought that the church school would solve their discipline problems. In part, they assumed that the kids were just in a bad environment, and if they removed the kids from the influences of their bad peers, then the kids would be all right. The problem was that in many of the cases, the kids who were sent to the church schools WERE the bad influnces, and they just carried that on to the church school.
There is an issue now in church schools due to the cost of sending kids there. There’s a reason one of Seattle’s Catholic high schools is sometimes referred to as “Blank-Check”–it costs a helluva lot to go there. While a lot of “ordinary” families do scrimp and sacrifice to put their kids in Catholic school, the economics of the times have led to the atmosphere being more and more dominated by wealthy parents sending their somewhat spoiled kids. This issue has in fact worked its way down to the elementary school level as well, and is enough of a concern that the Archdiocese of Seattle has established something called the Fulcrum Fund to subsidize tuition for less well-off kids and the operating budgets of Catholic schools in less affluent areas.
Hmm, long post, original didn’t take.
RR @ 33: In fairness, I should point out that the original big water projects were begun under the Republican administrations in the 1920’s. There was a reason why “Hoover Dam” got it’s name. Hoover made quite a name for himself dealing with relief efforts during the Mississipi floods in the 1920’s, and a lot of those early dams were considered primarily flood control systems.
But during the Great Depression Hoover & the Republicans clamped down on such projects, assuming that there would be insufficient tax revenues to pay for them in the economic downturn. FDR and his administration realized that it didn’t matter, that they had to “kick-start” the economy, and that the jobs and investment in infrastructure would create a reasonable return on what was essentially “borrowed money”.
One of the great benefits of that investment is that we got the infrastructure pretty cheap, considering the relatively cheap wages and price of materials at the time. If we had tried to do it post-WWII, the cost might have been pretty high, possibly causing a “trimming” of a good portion of those projects.
I think about that whenever you hear Eyman’s types complaining about the cost of infrastructure projects. “It’s too much!!!!” they always say. But the cost is invariably half as much as it will be to do it ten or fifteen years from now.
As for the investment in infrastructure prior to WWII:
The U.S. methods of enriching Uranium were dis-regarded by the Germans early in their program as being impractical because of the enormous amount of electricity required. Instead they were working on “heavy water” systems, which would take many years to create even a small amount of fissionable material.
At the end of the war these German scientists were interned in a camp in Gr. Britain, housed together in a barracks where the British had microphones installed and taped their conversations. When Truman announced the dropping of the first bomb at Hiroshima, they all immediatly scoffed and passed it off as Allied propoganda – they were convinced that it would take at least ten years for the Allies to produce enough fissionable material to make a bomb! Unfortunately for the city of Nakasaki, the Japanese physicists had reached the same conclusion, and after the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, they assured their government that there was NO WAY the Americans had enough fissionable material for more than one bomb, and it would take YEARS for them to produce a second one. A third bomb was never dropped because a captured U.S. B-29 pilot saved his life (and that of millions of Japanese) by lying and telling his Japanese interrogators that knew about the atomic bombs, he had seen dozens of them stacked up at Tiannan (sp?), and he knew that the next scheduled target was the Emperor’s Palace in Tokyo!
Hmm, site still won’t take my links regarding logistics. Suffice it to say that after Dec. 7th 1941, the U.S. didn’t immediatly begin producing weapons as fast as possible. Instead, they invested in the production of raw materials. This led to some early shortages of finished goods, but paid off in the long run when war production peaked in mid-1944. The Germans and the Japanese were overwhelmed in a logistics tide that they couldn’t have previously contemplated, as the U.S. not only supplied every Allied military, but also gave the Soviets substantial raw materials to feed it’s own war production.
Interesting info in 48, rhp. But I’m willing to call some of that into question. Never heard the story about a downed pilot telling his interrogators that Tokyo was next for atomic bombing, and I’ve read quite a lot about the actual Japanese surrender. Despite the wants of some in the USAAF, Tokyo was never considered a target of for atomic bombing, and the Imperial Palace was placed off-limits to any attack by American forces. In fact, Nagasaki owes its place in this sad history due to the fact that the day’s original target, an arsenal in the city of Kokura, was shrouded in smoke due to a conventional bombing of a steelworks in a neighboring town. And while a nuclear weapon may be the ultimate fire-and-forget weapon, the crew of the B-29 known as Bock’s Car were trained in line-of-sight visual bombing using the Norden bombsight, which the bombardier used to actually fly the plane onto the target, which was done when a hole in the clouds over the city of Nagasaki was found.
And the actual surrender of Japan was caused by a B-29 raid that killed nobody. The Japanese government, military and Emperor Showa had been debating terms of surrender, and the main sticking point in their internal debate was whether or not the Emperor would be tried as a war criminal under the terms of the Potsdam Declaration. The US government themselves were not sure of what to do with the Emperor, whose own role in war planning was never fully determined. B-29’s dropped leaflets over Tokyo that announced that the Emperor would not be punished, and a leaflet was picked up by Marquis Kido, the Emperor’s Keeper of the Privy Seal, on his way to the Palace. Kido showed the leaflet to the Emperor, who came to the decision that it was time to surrender, so he issued an Imperial Order (The Voice of the Sacred Crane) commanding his troops to immediately lay down their weapons and surrender via a vinyl recording broadcast over the radio.
47 ‘There was a reason why “Hoover Dam” got it’s name.’
I believe it was Will Rogers who claimed it was because Congress couldn’t persuade the President to change his name to Herbert Boulder.
(Ka-bomp…CHINNNG!!!)
Actually, after the war, we enjoyed something of a benefit from the still-mobilized industries and stockpiled supplies that made everything cheaper for a while. Witness all the new houses that got built so quickly for GI Joe and his sweetie to move into and start making all those babies. We live in Wedgwood (all built in the mid- to late 40’s) and most of the houses have furnace ducts made from aluminum and stainless steel from the Boeing surplus yard.
50 Vinyl? In 1945? More likely shellac.
it’s nice to see that you’re either the leader of Iran or in line with the Republican’s foreign policy.
When you write ” This was a debate that I would win even by losing, elevating my prominence by association, while inherently lowering his.”, you show exactly why we don’t negotiate with terrorists or terrorist nations.
I guess you’ll be writing a piece lambasting Obama any day now, huh? I’ll hold my breath…
Vinyl was just a colloquialism. IIRC, they may have actually been made of wax.
Quote –
——————————–
“I’ve no idea if I won or lost on points, but that was never my focus; my goal was to back Norquist into a rhetorical corner,… …and posed a question directly to Norquist, asking him to explain why spending tax dollars on education, even vouchers, is at all consistent with his philosophy of limited government”
——————————–
Isn’t the purpose of a debate to discuss good ideals; not prove who the better debater is?