Propaganda Stunt

It seems to me that the recent republican debate should have set off warning bells in hallowed academic halls and in the heads of elite social scientists all across the United States. Having been doing qualitative research for decades, they surely know a biased question from a neutral one. Why the silence? Anyone who has done any research at all can easily recognize the debate questions as a sham.

Nothing remotely like the truth is being sought after, just public manipulation. The debates, in the hands of the corrupt, have now become merely a staged propaganda stunt. Absurdly loaded questions combined with a biased debate format constitute a hijack of the deliberative process meant to highlight and separate the candidates on issues of substance.

Seriously, we now have debate “sideshows” that are on the par with middle school lunch-room discussions, not serious deliberation among potential future leaders of a 21^st century superpower. Anyone else disgusted with this?

How did this happen in America?

History Rescued From the Memory Hole Yet Again

H/T to Joel Skousen who pinpoints the exact moment the debate system crashed and burned giving way to the propagandist’s desire to control outcomes and fix elections.

The third Republican debate held on CNBC Wednesday night was another agonizing spectacle as liberal media journalists again used every trick in the book to attack and embarrass outsider candidates and promote insider favorites. Despite widespread criticism of debate moderators for failure to follow the traditional format of asking for straight, forward opinions on really important issues, the mainstream media can’t resist the opportunity to twist the agenda with “gotcha” type questions in order to manipulate public opinion. Despite widespread criticism of past moderators at Fox and CNN, CNBC moderators demonstrated even more animus and bias—so much so that they were roundly excoriated by the candidates and booed loudly by the audience. This week, I’ll describe the history of how the Powers That Be, who control both political parties, commandeered the debate process.

Those of you who were politically active during the 1970s and 80s remember when the League of Women Voters used to moderate the debates. The League is a very left-wing organization now (supporting universal health care, abortion rights, climate change controls and gun control) but in those days they made a serious effort to avoid any appearance of bias and only posed questions on substantive issues of the day. In 1984, they suddenly declined to sponsor any more debates after the Republican and Democratic National Committees joined together in a conspiracy to demand changes in the debate criteria, threatening to boycott the debates if they didn’t go along.

The major demand was to exclude any third party or independent candidates from participating. There was also a “memorandum of understanding” forwarded to the league that would have decided which specific candidates could participate in the debates, and the names of the panelists (thereby controlling the questions).

The League responded stating; “the demands of the two campaign organizations would perpetrate a fraud on the American voter.” A totally controlled private debate commission was then formed by the Democratic and Republican parties—the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD). The CPD is a 501C3 “charitable” organization (what a laugh) run by the National Committees of the two major parties, and it alone decides what controlled media organizations are going to host each debate.

When you look at who is running the CPD, you can see they are all liberals, including the Republicans: Frank Fahrenkopf, the former head of the Republican National Committee runs the show along with former White House press secretary Michael D. McCurry. The Board of directors includes Howard Graham Buffett (son of Warren Buffett), former liberal Sen. John C. Danforth, former CIA director Leon Panetta, Richard D. Parsons (CEO of Citigroup), disgraced former Senator Alan K. Simpson, and former liberal Republican Senator Olympia Snowe.

All are part of the Washington establishment and united in their desires to make sure a true conservative does not get the Republican nomination. While I am not privy to how deeply involved this committee is in the formulation of the questions, they do decide which networks get to host the debates and probably have a final say in who the debate moderators are going to be.