Initial Reax from CNN GOP debate: Rudy winner; questions geared toward leftward slant.
By paulseale Posted in 2008 — Comments (15) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
I gotta go mow the lawn so I am going to keep this short for now and will post a bit more in depth analysis later.
My thoughts on the CNN debate is simply this: Rudy clearly won with Huckabee in close second. He was passionate and articulate. It was very reminescent of his speech at the GOP convention in 2004.
With that said, I gotta roll my eyes to the back of my head with the questions from the crowd. The questions were without a doubt some of the most slanted to the left questions I have seen in a debate. Geeze.
It doesnt matter if you are talking about the lady who had her brother die in Iraq or the GOP State Representative. The questions were all geared toward framing the solutions in Democratic terms. You know, surrender in Iraq and socialize medicine.
Thankfully none of the candidates took the bait.
I am waiting for CNN to have a parent of a fallen marine ask them what the rush to surrender was for. Think its going to happen? Not likely. Why? Gee lets think about that for a moment.
Especially when answering the question in response to the lady with the fallen brother in addition to why Republicans lost in 2006.
more later.
I missed that part, can you please give me the Readers Digest version?
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Fred...Fred...Fred..!
He is so good at getting his message out. He's real. He can be funny as well as dead serious. I see him as the one to beat Hillary.
Except for Ron Paul, I thought all of them were head and shoulders above the Dems.
I agree about the audience questions. It was CNN!
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As long as Democrats keep getting elected, conservatives will never get what they want.
Someone needs to ask Rudy about how he would feel about cutting off all federal homeland security funds from cities like New York that are sanctuary cities.
Love to see his dodge on that one.
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Fred...Fred...Fred..!
to answer the question of what it means to be an American. Rudy quoting Abraham Lincoln was one of the best moments of the evening.
"We should scrap this “comprehensive” immigration bill and the whole debate until the government can show the American people that we have secured the borders -- or at least made great headway."
Fred Thompson
since anyone with a knowledge of history knows that Tancredo is right. We need a cooling off time to deal with assimilation just like we had after previous waves of immigration.
"Nothing works like freedom, Nothing succeeds like liberty"
Kyle
First, Paul...now, Tancredo?
Tom Tancredo said that being an American means cutting off your familial ties in your previous country. He tried to catch himself before it slipped out. And I don't know if he actually believes that...but he did say it.
I generally agree that assimilation is important with immigration. But I don't believe there was any candidate on stage tonight who doesn't believe that.
Saying or even believing that assimilation is important is not that big a deal. The question is which of the candidates supports policies that would best aid in the asssimilation process.
As kyle8 said, all past waves of mass immigration were followed by long periods of very low-moderate immigration. The wave that preceded the current one ended in the 1920s, and we had a lull from mass immigration that lasted over 40 years. Barring similar reductionist legislation today, there is no end in sight for the current wave, so it is off base for mass immigration proponents to use the 'we've been here before' argument, because we have in fact not been here before.
Why is it that proponents of unending mass immigration (especially conservative ones) almost never see fit to address this inconvenient bit of immigration history? I mean, the whole 'we've been here before' line of thought is wrong because the differences between now and then are so many, but the long time-out from mass immigration that followed and helped assimilate the past wave is a hard distinction to miss.
In my opinion, many of those periods where we limited immigration were based around racism more than a concern for the well-being of our country, particularly bills like the Chinese Exclusion Act.
I do not believe that is the case now. I believe most immigration opponents are sincerely concerned for their country and the well-being of Americans. I do not want to see this discussion veer off into a 2007 version of "O! Close the Gates".
Some of the push for cutting immigration in the past may have resulted from racism, but I doubt it was the chief motive of most restrictionists.
What does it matter now anyway? The restrictionists of the early 20th century won. They got what they wanted -- an end to mass immigration -- as a result of a series of laws and of course from the Depression and WWII. We had low levels of immigration for over 40 years as a result.
So my point is that things only turned out so well (as proponents of mass immigration love to say) AFTER the restrictionists got what they wanted. Things turned out so well and the immigrants were assimilated during a period of low immigration.
You mention the Lincoln part, but leave out the incredibly insulting line by Giuliani where he said 'we shouldn't be having a debate about legal immigration.' Unfortunately Tancredo was not given a chance to respond to that, though I don't know if it would have done much good if he had been, since he's not all that articulate...he strikes me as someone who simply cannot format all he has to say for such short intervals.
Giuliani should not have been allowed to get away with that. Of course we should have a debate about legal immigration, especially in light of how the preferred method of dealing with illegal immigration by people like Giuliani (and McCain, Bush, Kennedy, Reid, Pelosi, Graham, Hillary, Obama, et al) is to increase (already high) legal immigration to such an extent that it allows in most of those who would otherwise attempt to come illegally. Most Americans (or a plurality) favor reducing legal immigration, yet I guess according to Giuliani that sentiment is not fit for public discourse.
As to the Lincoln part; well its always tricky to take giants from days long gone by and try and apply their rhetoric and actions to current situations. But it can cut both ways. One thing we do know about Lincoln is that he was willing to wage a war that costs hundreds of thousands of lives to prevent the South from breaking away, so perhaps that suggests that he wouldn't take to kindly to a massive influx of illegal aliens, or the potentially balkanizing effects of it.
Rudy smacks down that infamous phrase by Senator Haircut:
http://www.cnn.com/video/player/player.html?url=/video/politics/2007/06/...
Ron Paul clearly did the best during the debate. In September when all the candidates are running to his position on Iraq, he'll be looking right as rain.
It's rare that you hear a politician give the real reason why reimportation of price-controlled drugs is a bad idea.
The answer to that question (how to bring drug prices down), by the way, is to set policies which discourage price controls in other countries. We're subsidizing all of them -- which is one reason our drugs are so high.
I was also glad to hear him say that it would be a bad idea for the Republicans to mimic Arnold Schwarzenegger. What kind of question was that, Wolf? Is popularity among moderates the holy grail of politics, or something?
As for the major candidates, I agree that Rudy did well -- I also think Romney did pretty well.