The frog and the scorpion

Your humble scribe has not been assiduously following the debates between the several presidential candidates of the various parties, not merely because it all seems so depressingly like a hideously extended version of Jeff Foxworthy’s “Who’s Smarter than a Fifth Grader?” without either the youthful charm or juvenile humor, but also because the election itself seems so very far away that he’s unwilling to dedicate any few of his ever-diminishing pool of brain cells to mere preliminaries.

He has cast the occasional despairing eye of the detritus of these debates however, and it was with some amusement that he discovered the right-hand side of the blogosphere has enumbraged itself with CNN, who apparently could not be bothered to check the antecedents of the “undecided” voters who had submitted YouTube questions for the candidates. Hugh Hewitt notes that CNN Vice-President David Bohrman explicitly claimed that -

“This debate is to let Republican voters pick from among their eight candidates,” said David Bohrman, Washington bureau chief and senior vice president for CNN. “We are trying to focus mostly on questions where there are differences among these candidates.”

Well, not so much, as it turns out.

It’s not healthy for Republicans to fash themselves about the world as it is, rather than the way they’d like it to be. After all, the Democratic presidential candidates didn’t boycott the Fox News debate in Nevada  merely out of some napkin-in-the-lap sense of moral fastidiousness, but because they pragmatically realized that offering to brawl among themselves on hostile ground is a recipe for at least potential disaster.

After all, a thing is what it does, and if the Republican candidates want to play Daniel in the lion’s den, then they probably ought go in one at a time. It’s not that they won’t get eaten – they might – but at least they won’t have to choose between the claws of their host to their front and the knives of their adversaries in their back.

Update: Welcome to the Instalegions, and thanks to himself for the link.