Saturday, July 28, 2007

Grampa Romney tries to learn us here kids about the interwebs

Given the relative success that the Democratic candidates enjoyed at the "YouTube debate," you'd think it would be logical for the mass of Republican candidates to accept similar terms for their YouTube debate, right? Riiiiiiight. Turns out, most of them are afraid to attend, worried, it would appear, that (a) they'll get asked tough questions that differ from the softballs their supporters normally lob their way, or (b) the public will see that conservative voters, i.e., the people asking the questions during the debate, are total freaks. Either of those is possible. So the basic reason for them not wanting to do the debate is sheer cowardice. However, they have to come up with satisfactory reasons for declining the invitations, and given the general idiocy on the Republican side of things this year, we can count on some hilarious explanations. First out of the blocks, Willard Mitt Romney:

Democratic consultants are rubbing their hands together at being able to portray their general election rivals as being — as one put it to me — "afraid of snowmen" or simply ignorant of techonologies that many Americans use on a daily basis. Indeed, Governor Romney today, in the context of evincing concern over Internet predators, supported that suspicion: "YouTube looked to see if they had any convicted sex offenders on their web site. They had 29,000," he said, mistaking the debate co-sponsor for the social network MySpace, which has recently done a purge of sex offenders from its rolls.
Hey, all those internets are the same, right? The kids today love the MySpace and the Facebook and the YouTube! I'm hip, kids! This is a tough call: on one hand, I think Romney is a scary, pandering, lunatic. On the other hand, his lunacy will provide nonstop hilarity for the next year. So I'm not sure where I stand on his candidacy.