Do We Need to Review the Last Republican Debate?

"Half an hour into Wednesday’s Republican presidential debate, Sen. Ted Cruz exploded at the CNBC moderators. “The questions that have been asked so far in this debate illustrate why the American people don’t trust the media,” Cruz fumed. “You look at the questions: ‘Donald Trump, are you a comic-book villain?’ ‘Ben Carson, can you do math?’ ‘John Kasich, will you insult two people over here?’ ‘Marco Rubio, why don't you resign?’ ‘Jeb Bush, why have your numbers fallen?’ How about talking about the substantive issues the people care about?”


By the end of the evening, Cruz, Carson, Trump, Rubio, and several other candidates had declared war on the press. They claimed to speak for the Republican Party, the American people, and the truth. These candidates are deluded.

Many of their statements were falsified on the spot.

Others were exposed as absurd by their opponents. It’s true that the debate exposed a division within the country. But the division isn’t between the press and the public. It’s between people who listen to evidence—reporters, policy analysts, and many Democrats and Republicans—and an impervious, defiant wing of the GOP.

Take Cruz’s speech. It doesn’t even match the debate transcript.

To begin with, nobody called Trump a villain. CNBC’s John Harwood asked Trump how he would fulfill his promises to “build a wall and make another country pay for it” (Mexico), “send 11 million people out of the country” (undocumented immigrants), and “cut taxes $10 trillion without increasing the deficit.” Second, nobody asked Carson whether he could do math. CNBC’s Becky Quick asked Carson how he would close the $1 trillion gap between current federal spending and the revenue projected from Carson’s 15 percent flat tax. Third, nobody asked Kasich to insult his colleagues. Kasich volunteered that Trump’s and Carson’s promises were impractical and incoherent. All of these questions were substantive. In fact, Cruz’s speech was a diversion from the query that had been posed to him—namely, why did he oppose this week’s agreement to raise the debt limit?

Presented with facts and figures that didn’t fit their story, the leading Republican candidates accused the moderators of malice and deceit.

Trump had no answers to the questions about mass deportation, his $10 trillion shortfall, or the magical Mexican wall fund. He cited his own bankruptcies as a model for fixing the national debt. “I've used [bankruptcy] three times, maybe four times. Came out great,” said Trump. “That is what I could do for the country: We owe $19 trillion. Boy, am I good at solving debt problems.” Carson, when confronted with his own tax shortfall, suggested that his tax rate was flexible and claimed that he could make up the difference by cutting unspecified waste...

But the biggest surprise of the night wasn’t Trump. It was Rubio. Having clawed his way above Bush in the electable-candidates bracket, the Florida senator chose to stand not with the sanity caucus, but with the deniers. When Harwood quoted anonpartisan assessment of how Rubio’s tax plan would affect after-tax income—a 28 percent increase for the top 1 percent of earners, and a 15 percent increase for the middle class—Rubio dismissed the gap, falsely, as an artifact of scale, since “5 percent of a million is a lot more than 5 percent of a thousand.” When Rubio was asked about his messy finances—a second-home foreclosure, a prematurely liquidated retirement fund, campaign money accidentally mixed with personal money—he pleaded poverty. He ignored Quick’s reminder that “you made over a million dollars on a book deal, and some of these problems came after that.”


Wow, pretty odd.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/10/republican_presidential_candidates_attack_the_truth_in_cnbc_debate_ted_cruz.html