Did You Miss Me?

I leave for 5 days and miss the Ansari X-Prize being won, Mount St. Helens almost but not quite blowing, Martha Stewart checking into the slammer, and a VP debate that caused everyone on the internet to go bonkers refuting a largely irrelevant claim made by Cheney about Edwards. I have the VP debate on the TiVo, and if I have anything to say about it after I watch it that hasn't already been said by 17,000 other websites, I'll mention it here. However, on the subject of the Vice President, I spent the week at training at a federal Department of Education facility and had to pass the official pics of Bush, Cheney, and the Secretary of Education every day. Cheney should not try to smile.

I did get home in time to catch the Presidential debate tonight. I rather liked that the audience tried to get the candidates to answer the questions that people really want to hear straight answers to. They largely failed, of course. The questions were blunt and to the point and predictable enough to allow the candidates to have practiced evading them. My personal favorite evasion was when someone asked Bush if he could name 3 mistakes he'd made. Bush evaded it by saying that the questioner was trying to goad him into admitting that Iraq, etc. was a huge failure and we shouldn't be there, but that he stood by his decisions on the big stuff like that. WRONG. I want to know the answer to that question to reassure me that we have a President capable of admitting that he's ever made an error. I'd be happy knowing that he is capable of fessing up that, in retrospect, maybe he shouldn't have had the tuna melt for lunch.

And for my favorite "I know what you want me to say to pander to your group and I'm not going to say it even if it means I know you'll vote for the other guy now" answer: to the woman who wanted assurances from Kerry that her tax dollars would never go to pay for an abortion, Kerry replied to the effect of, he's personally Catholic, etc. but that he could not as President impose that personal belief on others to restrict access to a legal medical procedure (In sum, as long as something is legal, what I think about it doesn't count for squat in policymaking).

I'm paraphrasing all of the candidate's replies, of course, but I'm reasonably certain the full transcripts of the debate will be out on the web soon if they aren't already.

Both sides got a few good zingers in, but I think this will do more to feed pundits than to change people's minds. We got to see them face some pointed questions, but didn't hear anything new of substance. At most, we finally got to hear from their own lips on live TV the answers that we already knew they would give.