Chris Rock with Larry King

Note: You can begin most of the videos about 15 seconds in to skip the music section and you can end the last video after about 1:50 before the weird typed tirade-ing goes on.

Watching these, you can feel the discomforting tension in the room. You can see Larry King thinking, And this is supposed to be funny?! while Chris Rock is scratching his head, wondering if his career must really have been launched from left field, thinking, Does this man really not get it?

A less comical take on the debate.

The New York Times

September 27, 2008

Editorial

The First Debate

The first presidential debate could not have come at a better time. We were afraid that the serious question of picking a new president in a time of peril, at home and abroad, was going to disappear in a fog of sophomoric attack ads, substance-free shouting about change and patriotism, and unrelenting political posturing.

The debate was generally a relief from the campaign’s nastiness. Both John McCain and Barack Obama worked to strike a more civil and substantive tone. And Americans could see some differences between the candidates on correcting the regulatory disasters that led to the Wall Street crisis, on how to address the country’s grim fiscal problems and on national security. There were also differences in the candidates themselves. Mr. McCain fumbled his way through the economic portion of the debate, while Mr. Obama seemed clear and confident. Mr. McCain was more fluent on foreign affairs, and scored points by repeatedly calling Mr. Obama naïve and inexperienced.

But Mr. McCain’s talk of experience too often made him sound like a tinny echo of the 20th century. At one point, he talked about how Ronald Reagan’s “S.D.I.” helped end the cold war. We suspect that few people under the age of 50 caught the reference. If he was reaching for Reagan’s affable style, he missed by a mile, clenching his teeth and sounding crotchety where Reagan was sunny and avuncular.

Mr. Obama has improved as a debater but needs to work on his counterpunch. Still, when Mr. McCain suggested that Mr. Obama was imprudent for talking publicly about attacking Al Qaeda sites in Pakistan, Mr. Obama deftly parried by reminding voters that his rival once jokingly sang a song about bombing Iran.

Mr. McCain came to the debate after one of the more ludicrous performances by a presidential candidate. With the markets teetering and Washington desperately trying to find a bipartisan solution, Mr. McCain tried to make the biggest question of the week whether he was actually going to show up for Friday’s debate.

Mr. Obama dominated the economic portion of the debate, arguing that the Wall Street disaster was the fault of the Bush administration’s anti-regulation, pro-corporate culture. He called for a major overhaul of the financial regulatory system. Mr. McCain stuck to his talking points, railing against greed and corruption. He showed little sign that he understood the fundamental failures in government illuminated by the market crisis.

Mr. Obama said that he would begin to address the country’s deep deficit by raising taxes on the wealthy, while cutting them for the vast majority of American workers. But he dodged the question of what programs he would have to sacrifice to help foot the proposed bailout’s $700 billion price tag. Mr. McCain dodged the same question with equal energy.

He clung to his argument that cutting Congressional earmarks — which amount to about $18 billion a year — and reducing waste and abuse would solve most of the country’s economic problems and allow him to continue President Bush’s catastrophic tax cuts.

It was disturbing to see that Mr. McCain seems to have learned nothing from the disastrous war in Iraq. He talked about recent progress there, which is indisputable, and his support for the troop surge that has brought down violence. But Mr. McCain still was talking about winning, rather than how he was going to plan a necessary and responsible exit. And he steadfastly refused to acknowledge that the decision to invade Iraq was an enormous mistake.

Mr. Obama offered no details on how he plans to get out of Iraq, but he offered an important truth when he said that the United States should never have invaded and can never win in Afghanistan as long as it is tied down in Iraq.

We didn’t hear nearly as much detail as we would have liked. But the debate was a move toward a serious discussion of this country’s many problems. Americans need to hear more of that, and less of the tactical sparring, before going to the polls.

Gail Collins, I want your job.

The New York Times

September 27, 2008

Op-Ed Columnist

McCain: Bearish on Debates

By GAIL COLLINS

John McCain looked a bit off his game during the big presidential debate. Maybe he was exhausted from parachuting into Washington to resolve the financial crisis. Really, there are only so many hills a man can charge up in the course of a single week.

The debate had barely begun, the financial crisis barely addressed, when McCain started off on government spending. “You know, we spent $3 million to study the DNA of bears in Montana …”

Oh, no! Not the bear study. Congress is working feverishly on the $700 billion rescue of the national financial system and McCain is complaining again about the $3 million the Senate blew to help determine whether the grizzlies are still an endangered species.

To be fair, both McCain and Barack Obama appeared equally eager to move past the central issue of the day and on to — anything else. Neither seems capable of saying anything about the credit crisis except that it’s important to protect Main Street from Wall Street. Don’t the other streets of America deserve a little consideration, candidates? Can we have a few mentions for Elm Street once in a while? What about Broadway?

Least compelling moment following the bear DNA episode: the intense argument over whose position on negotiating with Iran was most like Henry Kissinger’s.

This was supposed to be the foreign affairs debate, and it’s hard to beat down McCain on foreign affairs — anybody who can start a sentence with “I’ve been to Waziristan …” has a natural advantage. But Obama really more than held his own.

“John, you like to pretend like the war started in 2007,” he said. “You talk about the surge. The war started in 2003. And at the time, when the war started, you said it was going to be quick and easy. You said we knew where the weapons of mass destruction were. You were wrong.” Although this is a very old argument, it sounded remarkably fresh, like revisiting semiforgotten territory.

McCain stumbled over the name of the president of Iran and misstated the name of the new leader of Pakistan. This would, under normal circumstances, be less than nothing. But the first presidential debate is meant to be an event so fraught with meaning that combat to the death pales in comparison. Every word matters!

This campaign has been so chock full of excitement, however, that the debate lost some of its normal most-important-moment-in-history sheen. The real tension, after all, had been getting McCain there in the first place. A simple trip to Mississippi turned into a saga featuring many, many rapidly changing story lines:

* Cancel the debate!

* Maybe cancel the debate!

* No debate unless Congress passes a financial rescue bill!

* No debate unless Congress has a plan to pass a financial rescue bill.

* Oh, what the heck.

After all that, when the wandering debater finally showed up Friday night, he just looked like a smallish, grayish, slightly grumpy guy with a grizzly obsession.

To be fair, it had been a very long week for McCain, what with ruling out the debate, ruling in the debate and returning to a Senate from which he has been AWOL so long that it’s believed his desk is now being used to store janitorial supplies.

He raced there in answer to the crisis call, after a brief detour to New York to deliver a desperately needed speech on fossil fuels at the Clinton Global Initiative. He could not have sounded more filled with passion about service and country and the need for his leadership. Then he joined President Bush, Obama and members of Congress in a White House meeting that his campaign had orchestrated, where he sat in near-silence as a bipartisan consensus fell apart.

One thing we now know for sure. Electing John McCain would be God’s gift to the profession of journalism. A story a minute.

Imagine what would happen if a new beetle infested the Iowa corn crop during the first year of a McCain administration. On Monday, we spray. On Tuesday, we firebomb. On Wednesday, the president marches barefoot through the prairie in a show of support for Iowa farmers. On Thursday, the White House reveals that Wiley Flum, a postal worker from Willimantic, Conn., has been named the new beetle eradication czar. McCain says that Flum had shown “the instincts of a maverick reformer” in personally buying a box of roach motels and scattering them around the post office locker room. “I can’t wait to introduce Wiley to those beetles in Iowa,” the president adds.

On Friday, McCain announces he’s canceling the weekend until Congress makes the beetles go away.

Barack Obama would just round up a whole roomful of experts and come up with a plan. Yawn.

I could do with some Dentyne, apparently

So the new Dentyne ads are everywhere. I mean, all over the city. And I, for one, think they are adorable.

It’s all heartwarming. And makes me want to go make out with someone instead of sitting around on my computer. You can find the rest of the ads here. And a strange reason deterrent to being on the site as well.

A sign of our age?

Here is what I’ve noticed on facebook in the past few years:

Post-college, post-underappreciated-metabolism, people get chubby. People default to flattering, saving colors like black a lot. People also look a lot worse when drunk at this age.

So really, anyone who manages to stay thin, to not succumb to the easy seduction of lots of beers and happy hours and fried foods, and neglect the gym because it’s not absolutely dire yet for us to show up [there's no doctor yet breathing down our backs about heart disease and exercise tests], should be awarded somehow.

And then corralled together and forced to live with just each other so that the rest of us don’t have to look at them as we shove sticky buns in our mouths and wash down with coffee on our way to work every morning.