Some radio talk-show hosts and Republican bloggers have been complaining that the CNN/YouTube debate was stacked against the Republican presidential candidates who participated in it. There is evidence, they point out, that some of the questioners posing as voters were Democratic political operatives. But I don't think this constitutes a major journalistic scandal.
If Republicans want something to complain about, they should focus on the performance of Senator John McCain, who made the outrageous suggestion that U.S. handling of terrorists was somehow comparable to the use of torture by the genocidal Pol Pot, who killed two million Cambodians.
First of all, the candidates were not forced to be there. They knew the ground rules in advance and should have expected a stacked deck. Second, the questions posed by people in the videos were less controversial than the attacks and counter-attacks that took place among the candidates themselves. Nobody at CNN forced Giuliani to attack Romney, or vice versa. The YouTube questions were mostly a sideshow to these fierce attacks.
If this is such a big deal, the Republicans should organize a boycott of CNN in the same way the Democrats have refused to participate in a Fox News-sponsored debate. They won't do that because the Republican candidates are capable of acting like adults and taking questions and criticism from any corner. Going into the lion's den of CNN is good experience for any Republican who wants to be president. By contrast, Democrats look like cowards for refusing to be questioned by Fox News personalities.
We don't take a back seat to anybody in bashing the liberal media. But attacking CNN for lobbing liberal questions at Republicans, which is what they should have expected all along, doesn't make any sense under these circumstances.
There's been a lot of controversy over the fact that a homosexual retired General affiliated with Hillary's campaign asked questions about the military's policy on gays. Moderator Anderson Cooper says, in retrospect, that his affiliation should have been mentioned on the air. But would that have made any difference? Anybody who heard his question had to immediately understand that he was a homosexual activist. The candidates should have expected a question on that topic anyway.
For the most part, the candidates handled the questions, even those that seemed somewhat off-the-wall. Asked about Jesus and the death penalty, Mike Huckabee argued persuasively that capital punishment was justified and he took on the claim that being pro-death penalty is somehow inconsistent with being pro-life. He explained that "…there's a real difference between the process of adjudication, where a person is deemed guilty after a thorough judicial process and is put to death by all of us, as citizens, under a law, as opposed to an individual making a decision to terminate a life that has never been deemed guilty because the life never was given a chance to even exist."
Asked about flying the Confederate flag, Mitt Romney easily deflected it, saying that "Right now, with the kinds of issues we got in this country, I'm not going to get involved with a flag, like that. That's not a flag that I recognize or that I would hold up in my room. The people of our country have decided not to fly that flag. I think that's the right thing."
One of the questions enabled Rep. Ron Paul to mention the growing controversy over development of a North American Union. Accused of believing in a conspiracy, Paul calmly pointed out that "there is a move on toward a North American Union, just like early on there was a move on for a European Union…These are real things. It's not somebody made these up. It's not a conspiracy."
He went on to say, "It's just [that] knowledge is out there. If we look for it, you'll realize that our national sovereignty is under threat."
Paul was absolutely correct in his answer. I began learning the truth when I covered a conference in Washington co-sponsored by the Center for North American Studies that was devoted to development of a North American legal system. Academic literature distributed in advance to conference participants about a common legal framework for the U.S., Canada and Mexico included proposals for a North American Court of Justice (with the authority to overrule a decision of the U.S. Supreme Court), a North American Trade Tribunal, and a Charter of Fundamental Human Rights for North America, also dubbed the North American Social Charter.
Robert Pastor, who runs the Center for North American Studies, helps facilitate model "North American Parliament" meetings where students play the role of delegates to a trilateral legislature. One of his students, Marlon Brown, has written about Pastor's personal vision and plans for a "North American Parliament."
The worst performance of the night came not from the questioners or Anderson Cooper but from Senator John McCain. His remarks on waterboarding and torture were absolutely disgraceful and false.
McCain called waterboarding or simulated drowning "a violation of existing law," which is false, and a form of "torture," which is his opinion. McCain also declared, "We're not going to do what Pol Pot did," which is disgraceful demagoguery. Forcing secrets out of anti-American terrorists is not in any way comparable to a communist maniac torturing and killing two million people.
All of McCain's claims, it should be noted, followed Romney referring to reports that Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, the mastermind of 9/11, broke down and confessed to various terrorist plots after being waterboarded by CIA interrogators. Romney said he wouldn't discuss or condemn specific interrogation techniques because he didn't want terrorists to know in advance how they would be treated.
McCain said that he couldn't understand how that technique could be used on "anybody" ever "held in our custody." He said Romney's position was "absolutely beyond me."
These comments are being excused or even defended because McCain served his country and was tortured as a prisoner of war by the Vietnamese communists. But does this give him a license to spew phony facts and smear patriotic CIA interrogators wanting to stop the next 9/11?
McCain's remarks were far worse than anything uttered by the Democratic operatives posing as YouTube questioners.
