| | Bill -- I don't think Rand Paul was being evasive. He was trying to avoid getting sucked into an out of context clip that Democratic operatives would snip out and use in dishonest ads saying Paul is a racist.
I saw something like this happen when my former boss ran for Congress. He was getting interviewed by a leftist and statist (i.e., pretty much anyone in the MSM in Hawaii), and he was naive enough to say on camera in response to a question this: "I support President Bush on (insert random topic here) for these reasons ..."
The entire interview was clipped out and discarded except for the statement "I support President Bush", full stop, run in ad after ad by his despicable opponent, Mazie Hirono, thus falsely characterizing this moderate RINO who profoundly disagreed with Bush on numerous if not most issues as some sort of right-wing radical Bush lover.
That's what Maddow was deliberately trying to do there, get that three or five second clip for Democratic operatives to use in a hit piece, and Rand Paul knew that, and he refused to be a sucker and take the bait. He did answer the question, at length and in context, but on his terms, not on the terms of Maddow and the operatives who were surely watching her show looking for the "money shot" they could clip out, take out of context, and use against Paul.
That's politics. John Stossel is not running for the U.S. Senate. The first rule of politics, when asked a hostile question by someone trying to take you down, is answer the question you wished they had asked, not the question with its loaded and biased premises they want you to answer.
I wish politics could allow the sort of intelligent and thoughtful debate you're talking about, but that would require an electorate with an average IQ of about 120 or 130 or higher, similar to the profile of people here, not the actual 100 IQ average.
(Edited by Jim Henshaw on 5/24, 12:27am)
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