Should We Be Excluding GOP Candidates From Debates This Early?
Fox News and CNN are drawing a line in the sand -- er, on the debate stage. If you want to be part of the big show in the first Republican presidential debates, you have to be in the top ten in polling. Otherwise, you're consigned to other appearances on the network, or as Byron York called it, "the kiddie table." "The CNN Republican primary debate on September 16 will be divided into two parts featuring two different sets of candidates: those who rank in the top 10 according to public polling, and the remaining candidates who mean a minimum threshold of one percent in public polling, the On Media blog has learned." For college basketball fans, think of the second CNN debate as the NIT Tournament. If everyone agrees you won the second debate, you get to chant, "We're number eleven! We're number eleven!" Ace makes the case that at this point, no serious candidate should be left out: People don't know enough to make informed judgments yet. That is the point of a debate -- and that's the point of a first debate, surely. We are in the very beginnings of this process, and FoxNews is using polls of uninformed people (and I don't mean that negatively; most of us are uniformed at this point) to decide who is allowed to run for President. And yes, this poll -- based on nothing but name recognition -- will in fact knock five or six people out of the contest entirely. Once you're excluded from a debate, you are labeled "fringe" forever -- and good luck trying to get free media, volunteers, and donors once you've been labeled fringe. . . . This isn't a normal year. We have a lot of serious candidates. So do we stick with the usual, or do we adjust our practices to take into consideration the unusualness of this season? I think the latter. My proposal is that they split debate night into two panels, over two nights. (Or two panels on one night-- but that would be a long night, with around three hours total debate time plus time in between.) The top six in the polls would do a random draw to be split between the panels, three and three. Everyone else would do another random draw to determine which panel they'd be in. You'd end up having about 6-8 people per panel, which is a workable number. Note that the Fox "solution" solves little -- having ten people on the stage, answering the same questions, will be a huge [bad word for mess]! It's barely an improvement over having fifteen -- do the math. Assuming about an hour, all told, answering questions (once the questions themselves, commercials, and basic traffic direction are excluded), ten people would have about six minute each to answer questions. Fifteen people would have four minutes each. So we're fighting to get "four minutes of actual answers per candidate" up to six minutes? A lot of us have the cynical suspicion that some of the candidates know they have no shot at the nomination, and are running to achieve some lesser goal: the vice-presidential slot, a cabinet post, a television gig, bigger speaking fees and book deals after the election. Last cycle's experience demonstrated that even the longest of long-shots can end up being the flavor-of-the-month.  Wouldn't you like your smiling face to be on the cover of Newsweek, with a story about your "unlikely rise"? Attention, D.C. Media: We're Losing the War Against ISIS Don't look now, but we're losing the war against ISIS. In Syria . . . The Islamic State terror group controls over half of Syrian territory after seizing the village and archaeological site of Palmyra in the central part of the country Thursday, activists monitoring Syria's civil war said . . . The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that ISIS had also seized control of Palmyra's military air base, prison and intelligence headquarters. The Associated Press reported that the prison, known as Tadmur, is where thousands of Syrian dissidents have been imprisoned and tortured over the years. In Iraq: A spokesman for the governor of Iraq's Anbar province said Monday that about 500 people — both civilians and Iraqi soldiers — are estimated to have been killed over the past few days as the city of Ramadi fell to the Islamic State group. The estimates follow a shocking defeat as Islamic State seized control of the Anbar provincial capital on Sunday, sending Iraqi forces fleeing in a major loss despite the support of U.S.-led airstrikes targeting the extremists. Bodies, some burned, littered the streets as local officials reported the militants carried out mass killings of Iraqi security forces and civilians. Online video showed Humvees, trucks and other equipment speeding out of Ramadi, with soldiers gripping onto their sides. In Libya: In recent months, U.S. military officials said, Islamic State has solidified its foothold in Libya as it searches for ways to capitalize on rising popularity among extremist groups around the world. "ISIL now has an operational presence in Libya, and they have aspirations to make Libya their African hub," said one U.S. military official, using an acronym for the group. "Libya is part of their terror map now." . . . There are no trusted forces in Libya that America can work with to capitalize on bombings, as the U.S. is doing in Iraq. And maybe even in Egypt: Islamic State's Egypt affiliate on Wednesday urged followers to attack judges, declaring a new front in an Islamist militant insurgency in the world's most populous Arab state. The leader of the group, Sinai Province, called for violence against judges in an audio statement posted on a prominent jihadist website on Wednesday. Max Boot doubts we'll see the Obama administration make a significant change to the current failing policies: A rethink would have to begin with the acknowledgment that the current strategy isn't working. But although the White House is now willing to grudgingly concede that the fall of Ramadi is a "setback" (government-speak for a "defeat"), White House spokesman Josh Ernest still claims that "overall" the president's anti-ISIS strategy is still working. "Are we going to light our hair on fire every time that there is a setback in the campaign against ISIL?" Ernest truculently demanded. In a similar vein, the Journal quotes a "senior defense official" as saying: "The Department believes the current course of action is the right one." As long as the White House and Pentagon remain in a state of denial, they are unlikely to radically rethink their failing strategy. And indeed the Journal article offers scant evidence of such a rethink. It simply says that the White House "is poised to accelerate the training and equipping of Sunni tribal fighters" and to deliver "1,000 shoulder-held rockets" to Baghdad. In other words, pretty much more of the same strategy that hasn't been working. We're likely to hear a lot of debate in the coming weeks about whether the situation requires "boots on the ground." Pataki, a New York Republican, insisted that a deployment of U.S. combat troops would be a limited mission unlike the 2003 American invasion of Iraq -- a war then-President George W. Bush had insisted would be short-lived. "I don't want to see us putting in a million soldiers, spend 10 years, a trillion dollars, trying to create a democracy where one hasn't existed," Pataki said Wednesday on CNN's "New Day. "But send in troops, destroy their training centers, destroy their recruitment centers, destroy the area where they are looking to plan to attack us here and then get out." It's easy to forget that we already have "boots on the ground": About 500 paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division will deploy this summer to Iraq and other locations in the region to support Operation Inherent Resolve . . . There are about 3,000 U.S. troops currently deployed in Iraq, including about 1,300 paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne's 3rd Brigade Combat Team who deployed in January. And we've had short incursions into Syria, too: In the first successful raid by American ground troops since the military campaign against the Islamic State began last year, two dozen Delta Force commandos entered Syria aboard Black Hawk helicopters and V-22 Ospreys and killed the leader, a man known as Abu Sayyaf. So is the real question how many more "boots on the ground" should be deployed? Let's Hear It for Keeping Middle Eastern Artifacts in Western Museums Turning our attention back to Syria . . . ISIS militants seized "full control" of the ancient city of Palmyra after Syrian government forces retreated from the area Thursday, activists said. The reported gains by the Islamist group, which rules large parts of Iraq and Syria, will only intensify fears for Palmyra's residents and its archeological riches. ISIS fighters stormed the modern city, which is also known as Tadmur, on Wednesday. The city is just a few hundred meters from the ancient ruins of columns, temples and arches, which have been designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. U.N. and Syrian officials expressed fears that ISIS plans to destroy the ruins, just as it flattened the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud and smashed statues in Iraq's Mosul Museum. Hm. Are we so sure that taking ancient relics from Middle Eastern lands and putting them in museums in Western cities is really such a terrible form of cultural oppression? Isn't a museum in London, New York, or some other part of the West a safer place for these irreplaceable pieces of artwork and history than the countries that actually created them?  Good thing we got you-know-what out of Egypt back in the late 1930s. ADDENDA: Florida Democrat Alcee Hastings laments that as a Congressman, he's underpaid. | 
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