The Democratic Debate in Flint Was Yet Another Embarrassment

Almost everyone, including many Republicans themselves, compares the Republican debates to a raucous bread and circuses straight out of the Roman gladiatorial contests.  Trump insults Rubio and Cruz, references his private parts, and makes nasty comments about minorities and foreigners.  Rubio and Cruz aren’t much better, sneering back at Donald, calling him names and bringing Mitt Romney in for backup.

It’s an embarrassing horror show humiliating America in the eyes of the world.  The way things are going, when the Republicans next meet on March 10, they’re likely to pull out Derringers and shoot each other Hamilton-Burr style.

But at least they’re not boring.  Not only are the Democratic debates boring, they’re puerile and cliché-ridden non-events that could scarcely be called debates and are about as interesting as a four a.m. advertorial for cleanser on a cable channel — softball games in extremis.

Part of the reason is that the media is so pathetically in the tank for the Democrats they don’t dare ask them a tough, or even challenging, question. No Megyn Kellys here.  Not by the proverbial country mile.

An example Sunday night was when Anderson Cooper finally brought up the touchy question of Clinton’s emails, ever so gently asking Hillary how she would respond to Trump’s promised attacks on the scandal that could emerge, after the FBI investigation, as one of the most serious political crimes in American history.

Rather than answer the question, Clinton quickly changed the subject to how she had more voters, so far, than Trump. The evasion was so obvious you could drive the whole Russian army through it and probably part of the Polish as well. But did Cooper follow up?  He didn’t even blink and moved on to Sanders, inviting him to attack Trump for calling the senator a communist. It was journalism at its most slavishly biased. Cooper was so far gone, so throughly corrupted, he probably didn’t even realize what he did.

Of course, Sanders never broaches the subject of the emails himself, either out of cowardice or a seeming complete disinterest in the national security of the United States, an odd position for a presidential candidate.

But the yet larger, and even more important, question these “journalists” never dare ask the Democratic candidates is why our African-American communities are in such desperate, and worsening, condition after forty years of liberal policy.  It is a scandal far worse then Emailgate or Watergate. Instead, they focus on the topic of police brutality toward blacks, a problem, I suppose, but in the final analysis a distraction from facing the crisis of the dissolution of the black family that has lead to truly depressing levels of unemployment and crime in those communities. The possible causal relationship between that family breakup, with now some 75% of black children born out of wedlock, and the welfare system is never explored or even touched upon in the debates.

Quite the contrary. Instead the Democratic debates have become a kind of competition for who is the least racist, a pathetic exercise that is, again unconsciously, patronizing toward African-Americans.

Similarly, environmental subjects are never examined in these debates in a manner that is remotely scientific. A leftwing “environmental” assumption is always made without the slightest thought.  All environmental causes good.  All industry, unless “green,” bad.  It’s straight out of Orwell.

When the subject of fracking came up in Sunday night’s debate, it was another contest for who could separate him or herself most thoroughly from that dread technique that is supposedly polluting our water and despoiling the landscape. But one wonders if Sanders or Clinton knows very much at all about the various techniques of fracking or how they work.  I suspect not.  Most of our politicians have very little scientific expertise.  Clinton was revealed, in the latest email drop from the State Department, not to even understand when she was connected to wifi, something the average third grader can do these days.

So next time, when you’re excoriating the so-called embarrassment of the Republican debates, remember that at least they keep you awake.

Roger L. Simon is an award-winning novelist, Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and co-founder of PJ Media.  His next book – I Know Best: How Moral Narcissism Is Destroying Our Republic If It Hasn’t Already – will be published by Encounter Books in June 2016.