Some debate afterthoughts

I watched Tuesday night's debate.  Here are some after-the-debate comments I found interesting that you are not likely to see in the mainstream media.

From Drive-by Pundit via American Thinker:

Out of all the dishonest statements, evasions, and disquieting responses from Obama, though, one particularly stood out.  It was his response to an audience member who asked: "What has your administration done or plans to do to limit the availability of assault weapons?"After mumbling some unconvincing boilerplate about how much he deeply "believes in the Second Amendment," Obama said: "Frankly, in my hometown of Chicago, there's an awful lot of violence, and they're not using AK 47s.  They're using cheap handguns."

I was astonished.  Not just me, but my son and his fiancée, who is fresh out of the 'hood.  As if rehearsed, we all simultaneously leaped from our seats, hooting in total derision, loudly wondering what "hometown" he was talking about -- Nairobi?

Get this: the first "black" president of the United States, the man who worked as a South Side community organizer in Chicago, really believes that "folks" in the ghetto are still running around in afros, dashikis, and platform shoes, ducking behind Buick Electra 225s while taking potshots at each other with zip guns and .22s, once commonly referred to as "Saturday Night Specials."  Seriously?

Obama couldn't be more mistaken if he added that black gangbangers also schedule nightly rumbles with straight razors and switchblades after the malt shop closes.

No self-respecting gangbanger would be caught dead with a "cheap handgun."  These are people who think nothing of plunking down $500-plus for the latest pair of Air Jordans.  Do you think they're going to skimp on firepower?  The brothas and sistas of the hood are strapped with some serious, expensive heat, like Rugers, Glocks, and Berettas.  In some cases their handguns are blinged out with gold or silver plating, mother of pearl grips, and precious gems.

From the brilliant Stanley Kurtz over at National Review's The Corner:

The chief symptom of liberal distress is an intense form of denial.  Liberals now actually deny that conservatives exist.  There are, of course, strange, cartoon-like images that liberals call conservative, yet these bear little resemblence to complex conservative human beings with thoughts capable of posing a reasoned challenge to liberal convictions.  In psychiatic terms, liberals have split off an all-bad version of conservatism in an effort to defend against the intolerable reality of actual threats to the liberal point of view.  I don’t think this denial has quite reached the level of psychosis.  Perhaps we could call it high-functioning borderline instead.  At any rate, we are now clearly in the realm of pathology.

The problem is visible in the 2012 presidential and vice-presidential debates.  If we treat President Obama and the three debate moderators as manifestations of a troubled liberal mind, the progress of the debates makes perfect sense.  It is an exercise in the gradual breakdown of denial, accompanied by increasingly frantic efforts to shore that denial up.

The first debate reflected a relatively stable form of denial.  It had been going on for years, after all.  President Obama and Jim Lehrer simply assumed that no conservative opponent existed.  There was thus no need to prepare, no real need to show up, and no need for the moderator to impose time limits or interrupt the conservative with questions.  It’s easy enough to crush a stick figure.

Once Romney broke through this first form of denial, more active and less stable attempts at denial were required to hold reality at bay.  In the next debate, Vice-President Biden adopted a manic air, automatically rejecting all of his opponent’s arguments as absurd.  Biden’s comportment was socially dysfunctional and could not be maintained consistently throughout the debates, yet it served for a time to stave off a severe threat to liberal self-esteem.  The moderator, meanwhile, sharing the vice-president’s disregard for Paul Ryan’s existence (as anything other than a cartoon bad-guy) was oblivious to Biden’s bad behavior, and so refused to stop it.

By the third debate, the liberal patient’s internal conflict was out in the open.  Obama was forced to deal with his opponent as an actual being, worthy of serious argument.  Yet this distrurbing intrusion of reality forced the moderator into an embarrassing public display of total denial, simply negating the reality of Obama’s Libya coments, and breaking with her proper role (more social dysfunction).  Frequent interruptions of the conservative’s argument were necessary for the moderator at this point.