I forgot about tonight's debate until about 9:30. The VCR is now recording C-Span's rerun, but it looks like I've missed about a half hour of it. I think there's another rerun after that, but I'm not sure.

Tonight I went to Andrew Sullivan first. Sullivan thinks that Edwards won, but he acknowledges that his is the minority view. The conventional wisdom is that Cheney won, which was entirely predictable, since the media script practically demands it, and it would take a catastrophe to push the media leviathan off its course. One does learn something from watching years worth of Aaron Spelling weekly soaps condensed into daily syndication reruns on commercial cable, and that is how to predict next week's storyline. No matter how many surprises there are at the detail level, the larger plot follows a pattern. It has to, or the story will die, and the story can't die. In the next debate, Bush will do "surprisingly" well. The last one Kerry will probably win again so that Bush can be "underdog" for a while, but that's not quite clear yet.

One of Sullivan's readers writes in to rebut. Among his comments, he offers this statement by Cheney as the "money quote":

Money quote? Are you kidding me? Not having watched, I don't know the context, but that's a perfect set-up line if I ever saw one.

For those who haven't already figured it out, the correct answer is:

And I say that as someone who likes Howard Dean and resents him being portrayed as a villain anything like Bin Laden.

What was Edwards' answer? I guess I'll have to watch the tape.

9:58:04 PM  [permalink]  comment []