(IL-06) Debate Blowout Duckworth vs. Roskam
Fri Oct 13, 2006 at 12:45:22 AM PDT
Tonight was the live debate between Tammy Duckworth and Peter Roskam at College of DuPage. How big is this race? There were camera crews there from as far away as Japan and Norway. Apparently the rest of the world thinks this is
THE prime example of the divide in American politics today. And after tonight I have to say they're right. Read on for just how far out there in Wingnutville Roskam is, farther than I knew and some great ideas from Tammy I hadn't heard before.
UPDATE: through out and at the bottom
Duckworth for Congress
First of all you'll be able to watch the debate on CSPAN soon. Check
their website for listings.
I won't keep you in suspense, I think I can safely say Tammy won the debate. She knows her stuff, she knows his stuff and frankly I have a big mouth and am a sexual intellectual (as Jimmy Buffett would say) and I wouldn't want to debate her. I also wouldn't want to get on her bad side. She reminds me of my Uncle Harry who survived the Battle of the Bulge and the Tet Offensive. Tough as nails and commands the room when she wants or needs to.
Roskam is a marginal candidate better suited to the far reaches of wingnuttery than the suburbs of Chicago. He's got cute kids though. They all shouted in unison "We love you daddy!" at the introduction. Isn't that cute? When he talks about school issues he brings them up. He's smarter than Santorum, he switched them into public school last year.
His act is geared toward appealing to a coalition of the worst our country has to offer. He's got the no abortion for any reason cuz Jesus might come back as a product of rape or incest crowd, the NRA says the 2nd amendment allows me to mount a .50 caliber machine on my roof militia, and tonight he actually said global warming was junk science! His position on the environment despite Bush's own commission telling us that the..uh..SCIENTIFIC research has it right is the same as Bush's was 5 long years ago. This man is shoveling Michael Crichton crap to people who think the planet can sustain a standard internal combustion gasoline powered car in every garage from here to Timbuktu. Christ I hope Jerome isn't reading this, he might have a stroke.
At this point I'd like to mention that it snowed today. In Downers Grove Illinois. On October 12th. Though NPR said it's happened in recorded history before I've lived in Chicagoland most of my life and I've never seen that. My sweetheart Pam, (hi Pam!) up near Kalamazoo says the snow stuck up there. Yeah maybe we're just entering another mini ice-age. But tell that to the Norwegians who will all be moving to Florida in a couple of decades, if they can get in, when the Atlantic conveyor collapses and Oslo is snowed in 365 days a year. Oh wait, I forgot Florida is gonna be mostly underwater and Roskam's immigration position.
Roskam's position on immigration is the same as Sensenbrenner's. We're gonna ethnically cleanse our country of 12 million illegal immigrants. Never mind how racist that is. Never mind the $5/lb. we'll be paying for peppers and peaches. Think about how practical it is. We don't have the soldiers to pacify Iraq or Afghanistan. Roskam proposes to keep National Guard troops on the border forever. Says they work desk jobs while freeing up border guards to make arrests. Tammy's response? Her old unit just deployed to the border in helicopters. You damn sure don't need helicopters to do desk jobs. Raise your hands if you thought joining the National Guard would be a full time job for lousy wages and benefits making the country safe for psychotic racist economic illiterates. After 3-1/2 years of Iraq and Afghanistan if these Guard soldiers had lives and their units had equipment they're pretty much gone now. What kind of idiots think that's a workable solution?
For energy solutons he sides with Cheney. The same old crap about subsidies for new refineries, never mind that the oil companies shut down refinery capacity in the 90's to squeeze up prices. Never mind that even the oil companies don't want to expand into greenfields. It's a mature industry and they like being in the towns near ports and oil fields where they're already welcome. They wouldn't build new refineries if they could. They'd add on where they are.
Tammy on the other hand proposes that we use our advantages here, our great schools, industry and Argonne Lab to become the Silicon Valley of energy independence.
It's late and I'm getting tired. I can't write it all or I'll be up til dawn. We had an overflow crowd tonight in a big hall about the size of a big highschool gym. About 20% of the attendees had to listen outside in the foyer. Inside I'd say we had about 60-40 Tammy supporters at the end judging by the applause. One of our people outside said she was talking to a woman and her son, about 19, during the debate. That woman didn't know anything about the candidates, wanted to come down and see them. About halfway through she said she'd had it, couldn't take him anymore. Tammy had her vote.
Objectively I can see her point, he speaks like a smarmy lawyer/politician. Brags about the obviously inconsequential stuff he's done or advocated to pad his resume. Tries to cloak his far right positions in slick mumbo jumbo that leaves even his supporters wondering what he's talking about. Uses his kids as some weird cheerleader squad. From where I stood even his 5 o'clock shadow looked Nixonesque.
So anyway to wrap it up Tammy kicked butt. She effectively reiterated her positions and neutralized his lies which have also been getting a lot of pretty honest play in the local press. In response he held up copies of her mailers which nobody could see and said she was being mean after saying in her great TV ads and the killer radio address we needed to stop the partisanship. You don't know how silly a politician can sound until you've heard a DeLay disciple who's spent $1.4 million of the NRCC's money on negative ads complain about his opponent attacking him.
His summation was an odd homage to Henry Hyde's bipartisanship (Henry Hyde? the leader of the Clinton impeachment, ya gotta be kidding me! everybody laughed) and how we are the envy of the world. He thinks the world envies instead of resents us these days. In tone it kind of reminded me of Bob Dole's "we can go back to the 1950s again" acceptance speech plea at the Republican convention in 1996 combined with Reagan's "morning in America" optimism. But in reality it's completely at odds with the fear, racism and ignorance he and his party peddles. It probably works for him when he's speaking to a room full of fatcats who want the government to protect not just promote the general welfare of the most prosperous among us at the expense of everyone else. But that's a tiny minority in this country, even in this relatively affluent county and thanks to George Bush it's getting smaller every day.
10/13 UPDATE: Tammy hammered him pretty good on his ties to Hastert, Bush and the whole corrupt leadership of the Republican party. If he pulled that (eeek!) Nancy Pelosi is from San Francisco crap I don't remember it. He may have but
when he tried to tar her as corrupt for a $1000 campaign contribution she got from a friend of the clown who was indicted yesterday for demanding kickbacks on state contracts she smacked him right back with the half a million he got from Bush at the yesterday's closed door fundraiser who also got $5000 from the guy who btw wasn't even named in the indictment. Talking about who would be in Dem leadership
isn't winning proposition right now for any Republican. It just leaves them wide open to the Hastert, Foley, Cunningham, DeLay, Ney, Abramoff, Bush scandals and Tammy bulldozed through that door a number of times specifically when he defended the use of earmarks. There's nobody better or more knowledgable at talking about government waste, especially in the DOD than Duckworth and she made a shambles of his argument.
Duckworth for Congress
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