The Travesty on ABC

All day I’ve wanted to post about last night’s awful debate on ABC. I’ll admit, once I saw who was broadcasting it, I didn’t expect much, as I haven’t forgotten about that wretched Path to 9/11. But it was worse than I could have imagined, and I’m not the only one who was appalled.

I actually have to say I was pleased to see all the blowback. All the blogs I read expressed outrage and anger over the empty, vapid posturing that tried to pass itself off as debate moderation. It’s about damned time we started demanding better political discourse. This is the most important election in our lifetimes, and we deserve better.

Will Bunch at Philly.com wrote an open letter to Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos that pretty much says it all:

With your performance tonight — your focus on issues that were at best trivial wastes of valuable airtime and at worst restatements of right-wing falsehoods, punctuated by inane “issue” questions that in no way resembled the real world concerns of American voters — you disgraced my profession of journalism, and, by association, me and a lot of hard-working colleagues who do still try to ferret out the truth, rather than worry about who can give us the best deal on our capital gains taxes. But it’s even worse than that. By so badly botching arguably the most critical debate of such an important election, in a time of both war and economic misery, you disgraced the American voters, and in fact even disgraced democracy itself. Indeed, if I were a citizen of one of those nations where America is seeking to “export democracy,” and I had watched the debate, I probably would have said, “no thank you.” Because that was no way to promote democracy.

People aren’t stupid. We know that this kind of “journalism” has helped promote the economic and moral decline we now face. Thank goodness people are finally pushing back.

Chickens, meet Roost.