Tough Questions

There’s been a great effort in the past several days to make excuses for Barack Obama’s universally panned performance in last week’s presidential debate, with pundits blaming everything from the thin mountain air to having John Kerry as a sparring partner, but few of the president’s fans will acknowledge a more unsolvable problem. The president was not only facing tough questions for the first time in his political career, he was facing questions for which there simply is no good answer.

When Mitt Romney noted that Obama had promised to cut the federal deficit in half within four years but had instead doubled it, for instance, there was no disputing the factual basis of the complaint and no option but to offer excuses. The final debate will likely spare Obama the embarrassment of answering to that point again, as it is intended to deal exclusively with matters of foreign policy, but even hen the president will be hard-pressed to answer some of the questions that are sure to arise no matter the elevation of the site or who is helping out during the debate preparation.

The attack on the American embassy in Libya by Islamist mobs on Sept. 11, which resulted in the deaths of the ambassador and four other Americans, will raise several tricky questions.

It has now been widely reported, despite the reluctance of the press to disclose anything that reflects poorly on the administration, that the embassy in Libya had lax security despite repeated warnings that an attack was being planned. The president has thus far managed to avoid questioning about this infuriating fact, but it is unlikely he will be able to do so during the debates.

While he’s at it, Romney should also ask why the administration continues to lay the blame for the attack on an obscure low-budget video released months before the murderous riot when they had to know that it was, at most, a convenient pretext for a pre-planned attack motivated by anger over the country’s ongoing war against al Qaeda. It’s the sort of thing that the press would be eager to question a Republican administration about, but apparently it will take a presidential debate to force an answer from a Democrat.

As an adherent to a much-maligned religion himself, Romney might also ask why the president has been so exceedingly sensitive to the religious sensibilities of those who attacked our embassy and murdered our citizens, going so far as to imprison the aforementioned filmmaker and tell the United Nations that “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.” There have been no official scolding of the artists who immerse crosses in urine or depict Jesus Christ as a transvestite, or the so-called comedian and million dollar donor to the Obama who routinely ridicules Christianity, much less the producers of a hit Broadway musical that mocks Mormonism, so it would be useful to know why Islam is alone among the world’s religions in enjoying an exemption from the nation’s long tradition of free speech.

Perhaps so few Americans still care about the lives of our diplomats, the honesty of an administration, and the right to free speech that none of this will come up during the “Town Hall” debate, but surely Romney will get to these questions in their last face-to-face encounter. If Obama and his new debate coach can come up with good answers to these questions, we will be most eager to hear them.

— Bud Norman

Mindset Over Matter

One of the annual journalistic rites of the back-to-school season is the feature story about the latest Beloit College Mindset List, that famous compendium of fun facts about the technological, cultural, and political forces that have influenced the newest freshman class of college students.

The list was originally devised to help Beloit College professors understand their empty-headed young charges, but has since become the little-known institution’s most important source of publicity. It’s less expensive than fielding a championship-contending football team, and doesn’t entail the risk of a recruiting scandal. At any rate, we always look forward to these articles, as they always provide ample material for grumbling about these fool youngsters, a favorite pastime of ours, and often feature a revealing tidbit or two.

This year’s list includes the usual observations about the relatively recent technological innovations that the incoming freshmen take for granted. It is noted that the new students “have always lived in cyberspace, addicted to a new generation of ‘electronic narcotics,’” leaving baby boomers to lament that the youngsters don’t know the old-fashioned pleasures of pharmaceutical narcotics, and that they have grown up with MP3s and iPods and “never listen to music on the car radio and really have no use for radio at all,” meaning they also don’t know how to lay a needle down on a 33 rpm record to hear music the way God intended. The list doesn’t note that this year’s freshmen grew up with very little new music worth listening to on any device, but perhaps that just goes without saying.

The cultural changes cited on the list are just as depressing. It is noted that the “ditzy dumb blonde female” stereotype has largely faded from entertainment, which could be considered progress, but that “it has been replaced by a couple of Dumb and Dumber males.” The freshman “have lived in an era of instant stardom and self-proclaimed celebrities, famous for being famous,” and the prototype reality show “The Real World” has been on television their entire lives. They’re apparently a very irreligious lot, as “The Biblical sources of terms such as ‘Forbidden Fruit,’ ‘the writing on the wall,’ ‘Good Samaritan’ and ‘The Promised Land’ are unknown to most of them,” although we’ve noticed that this sort of ignorance is not a recent phenomenon.

The political influences on the youngsters have also been baleful. “Since they’ve been born, the United States has measured progress by a 2 percent jump in unemployment and a 16 cent rise in the price of a first class postage stamp,” the list notes, and “They have come to political consciousness during a time of increasing doubts about America’s future.” It is unclear how conscious of politics they have become, however, as the list also notes that “If the miss The Daily Show, they can always get their news on YouTube.”

Despite such generational handicaps, we suspect that the students entering academia will somehow muddle through to the day when they will read of the latest Mindset List and shake their heads sadly at the young whippersnappers who have followed. In the meantime, we take some consolation in know that we’re not professors at Beloit College.

— Bud Norman