That Political "debate" has no real pulse in America is hardly news. People give prepared remarks and take limited questions from a culled pool. The Senate, as an openly deliberative body? Pshaw.
What is new, at least to the level that it has been perfected, is the agenda setting done by the Press, that appears to be getting more widely adopted than anyone feared.
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This takes the form of people whose job it is to sit around and figure out how to frame questions to nail ideological dividing lines that can be used for political mobilization.
That's a fancy way of saying O'Reilly goes on Letterman and hits him with the question, "Do you want to win in Iraq? ... It's a simple question, Sir."
That's a fancy way of saying O'Reilly goes on Letterman and hits him with the question, "Do you want to win in Iraq?"Cavuto hits Barney Frank with something like, "Should the maximum tax bracket be over 40%?" Of course, the infamous one is, "When did you stop beating your wife?", which cleverly buries the assumption, just maybe not as deeply as the others.Tonight, we saw more of the same, in varying degrees. "Will you take a no new taxes pledge?" "Are you more patriotic than your pastor?" "No matter what military advice you get, will you withdraw?" "Will you attack Iran when they attack Israel?"
These all appear to be pseudo "red lines", designed to set-up a stark, distorted politics, one that corrals the electorate into camps and depopulates the precious middle.
