A Real Debate

Forget the dog-and-pony shows that have been foisted on the public by the media and the politicos during this unbearably long campaign season. I've long given up the hope that anything substantial would emerge in such a rigorously controlled political environment circumscribed by candidates too cautious to utter anything interesting. It seems that the true debates are going to be left to the surrogates of the left and the right who have no axes to grind themselves, and therefore can speak forthrightly and as they please without the media and the blogosphere parsing every sentence and punctuation.

Yesterday I witnessed such an event in Los Angeles, a pleasingly involving argument between spokesmen form the left and right, couched as a guest speaker event sponsored by the American Jewish University, whatever that is, and held in the cavernous Universal Ampitheater. The debaters were newsman and recent Bush press secretary Tony Snow, and that wild wag Bill Maher, fresh off another season of gadflying on HBO.

Although my initial sympathies were, as for most of the crowd, with the iconoclastic Maher, and against the Republican stalwart Snow, I found their presentations to be counterintuitive. Snow was charming and ingratiating, happily ceding that he was the enemy voice. Maher was smug, exactly as he behaves on his show, and given to rude interruptions and heady declarations. He also repackaged so much of what his writers had given him on the show that I was certainly hoping he was paying them residuals. In both cases, though, I applaud the speakers, who challenged the audience with great unorthodoxies--Snow as the Republican championing John McCain, and Maher as the dedicated atheist, fielding questions from a Rabbi and proclaiming to an audience of mostly Baby Boomer Jews how the Old Testament God was a real jerk.

The rabbinical moderator was cool throughout, and thankfully did not linger on those same stupid inane personal questions like the hosts of Presidential debates. Nothing about why Snow felt compelled to leave the administration, though his colon cancer was referenced (opening up the potential for some joke line, thankfully not pursued); nor did he linger on Maher's famous dismissal from ABC for saying that 9/11 killers were not necessarily "cowardly" because they gave their lives to their cause.

I enjoy Maher's HBO show, and many of his pronouncements, though he is also prone to occasional and troublingly extreme positions, such as his disbelief in the value of any prescription drugs. It's also refreshing to hear such a knowledgeable exponent of the dangers of religion and the historical problems it's caused. He was countered by Snow, a converted Catholic, who argued that atheist leadership has led to more deaths than religious warfare. Snow's points of reference were the regimes of Hitler and Stalin; Maher countered that those were actually political religions in which the leaders were granted god-like stature, rather like North Korea's Kim (and or course Mao, whom he did not mention). I felt that that was a bit of sophistry, though Snow could not deny that much wrong had been done in the name of religion. Maher's most interesting point came in discussing the Ten Commandments, the first four of which are about paying proper heed to God and no one else, as though God had a major inferiority complex.

Of course there was the expected political discourse. Snow's advocacy of McCain fell on the deaf ears of the audience, though he did strike a chord when saying that the Democrats, for all their Bush-bashing, have yet to present any kind of compelling agenda to bring about great differences. As genial as Snow was, though, he exhibited the problems that most Administration advocates have, which is making truisms out of very questionable assumptions, like "The Surge is Working." Almost every sentence of Snow's commentary contained the phrase "The fact of the matter is," when there was no fact at all, just a supercilious defense of the people for whom he was a recent spokesman.

Maher scored the most points when he mad the simple statement that McCain is basically proposing a continuation of the policies of an administration that has the support of less than a third of the population. He implored those folks still dithering between McCain and whichever Democrat survives to consider the cost of continuing those policies. Snow had no answer to that.
But they both left the audience with legitimate issues to discuss, and no flag lapel pins to obsess upon.