Tuesday, January 24, 2012

No Exit/Il miglior fabbro

I did something I hadn't done before in this cycle, which is to watch one of the Republican presidential debates from beginning to end. Since that represents two hours of my life I'll never get back, herewith I present a quick synopsis and a recommendation.

  • The overall impression I got was similar to the sensation I got when I saw a production of Sartre's "No Exit" during my college years. You saw a bunch of unpleasant people in a version of hell that is entirely of NBC's making. If you look up "unctuous" in the dictionary, there's a picture of Brian Williams next to the definition.
  • Mitt Romney does a lot better with the attacking when he hires the job out to surrogates. I really don't know if what he said about Newt Gingrich is true, but he came off as desperate and irritating.
  • Newt Gingrich went into his "well I declare, I don't know what you're talking about, Mitt" mode for most of the debate, which was effective because it seemed like Mitt didn't know what he was talking about.
  • Rick Santorum continues to come across as an earnest statist with no real reason for being on the stage. He's not going to be president.
  • Ron Paul is mostly correct in what he says, but he's still got that crazy uncle persona going and I think Stephen Green's observation is spot-on: "Is Ron Paul shrinking or are his suits growing?" 
Speaking of which, Green, who writes for PJ Media under the handle "Vodkapundit," has been "drunkblogging" the debates and his synopsis is better and more amusing than most of the other post-mortems I've read. This observation I think is 100% correct:

7:24PM There is only one explanation for this debate: NBC News wanted to show off the GOP contenders as the world’s Most Boring and Irrelevant White Guys. On tomorrow night’s NBC News primetime program, the second coming of Black Jesus. Compare and contrast, dulled audience.
Maybe not the nicest way to put it, but that's about it. I strongly recommend clicking the link -- he's really good and makes at least a half dozen other observations that ring true.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Unctuous...actually, It's Romney's picture in my dictionary;)

Rich