Debate Thoughts

At Powerline, Steve Hayward has some thoughts on the Republican debate last night:

So when Ron Paul, the crazy uncle of the field, said in the opening exchange that criminal law had “worked well” with Timothy McVeigh, your could see Newt across the stage coil up like Alex Rodriguez seeing a slow hanging curveball coming toward the plate.  You could see this coming a mile away: “Timothy McVeigh succeeded.  He killed a lot of Americans.”  Newt went on to make the obvious point (paraphrasing here): I don’t want a law that says we get you after you’ve destroyed an American city.  We need a body of law that enables a president to stop it from happening.  Newt established his dominant position right out of the gate.

I could detect Ron Paul audibly snort when Rick Santorum, weighing in on this same thread, rather foolishly but approvingly said that Lincoln “ran over civil rights” during the Civil War.  Never mind instructing Santorum here: had I the chance, I would love to ask Ron Paul, “Why do you belong to the Party of Lincoln if you share the view that Lincoln was a Constitution-shredding president who is the primary author of big government in the US?”  (It’s a commonly held view among the most extreme and simplistic libertarians.)

And:

Another minor flub that got a flinch was Rick Perry saying that “Afghanistan and India are working together” on Pakistan.  Um, I doubt many Indians would conceive the matter that way.  And the idea of free trade zone as a remedy for the region’s instability seems a tad goofy, too.

On Syria, Herman Cain said one thing we ought to do is “stop buying oil from Syria.”  I guess he thinks all Arab nations must have oil because they’re Arab.  And then he managed to change the subject to economic growth at home.  I was sure we were about to get “nine-nine-nine,” but Cain restrained himself.

I want to add a little more to Hayward's very prescient thoughts.

Herman Cain's answers were all about "listening to his commanders on the ground" but after that, there was nothing of substance whatsoever.  The real question is this:  how does Cain know that his commanders on the ground are correct?  Does Cain just want the commanders then running the show in place of the executive?  During the Civil War, Lincoln surely listened more than to just his commanders on the ground  and in some cases, he removed those commanders.  There has got to be a standard of judgment outside of what the commanders say.  Cain doesn't seem to fully realize this.

Santorum is sometimes doing well and other times not.  He really needs to cut it out with the I-am-not-getting-enough-air-time-routine; that really marginalizes him as a candidate.  And he also stated that under his watch, he would have the TSA profile all Muslims...but how does one do that?  Religion is not like race or gender.  A person doesn't have their religion stamped on their forehead.

Rick Perry said he would end sending "blank checks" to Pakistan.  Memo to Rick Perry:  that's not how it works.  Surely foreign aid should be on the table when cuts to the federal budget are being debated, but he should give a realistic assessment of how it's actually done, not a simplistic reproduction.