If you think that travesty of a "debate" couldn't get any worse, get a load of the backstory on one of those "man-on-the-street" questions from Wednesday night:
Nash McCabe is the voter from Wednesday night's presidential debate who noted that Barack Obama doesn't usually wear a flag pin and asked, "I want to know if you believe in the American flag."
ABC, which hosted the debate, had tracked her down after she was quoted in a New York Times story about white voters in small-town Latrobe, Pa., revealing her as 52, out of work and against Obama.
It turns out McCabe was featured in an April 4th NY Times story, expressing pretty much the same opinion. So ABC decided this was a question representative of the primary voting public and ran with it, putting Obama on trial in the court of public opinion, as it were.
The more I think about it, there wasn't so much debatable content (what did the candidates actually "debate?") as there were broad accusations designed to confer guilt upon the recipient (more so Obama than Clinton). It was, in other words, a show trial, and that is a rather chilling thought given that the press considers itself the intermediary between the elites and the public.
--Mori Dinauer
