NixGuy Is All Over the Coverage of Last Night’s Debate, and THE TOPICS (UPDATED, Carried to Near the Top of Tuesday)

WOW — an excellent Energizer bunny roundup (keeps going and going …..). Go there for the latest on media and other coverage of what WoMD started and this blog analyzed in detail. Separately, Nix makes THE point about the hypocrisy of criticizing Dennis Hastert over Mark Foley and while giving Ted Strickland a pass over his “problem” employee (as does Bob Burney, whose audio is linked at RAB).

That of course does not mean I’m not going to make a few observations throughout the day. Of course I will.

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NECESSARY TOP-OF-LIST UPDATE: Newshound is all over this crap from the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s Mark Naymik, and rightly so (bold is mine) –

Trailing badly in the polls and unable to steal the momentum in the previous three gubernatorial debates, Republican Ken Blackwell resurrected charges against his opponent Monday night that have long been discredited but nonetheless stole the spotlight in their final meeting.

Mark — The 1999 vote hasn’t been “discredited.” It happened.

Mark — The employment without adequate screening by Strickland of a convicted sex offender in the mid-1990s hasn’t been “discredited.” It happened.

Naymik is either lying through his teeth or a breathtakingly ignorant political reporter. Take your pick.

UPDATE 2: This post from John Hawkins at Right Wing News about Virginia US Senate Democrat candidate James Webb is interesting and timely.

Get this:

….. someone alerted me to a depraved passage in another one of Webb’s other books ….. For reasons I cannot fathom, in Webb’s book, Lost Soldiers, he has a scene that features incestuous pedophilia. Now here’s the kicker: not only is it a completely gratuitous scene, the characters in the book, bizarrely, don’t even seem to react to a sex act being performed on a child in front of them.

(goes on to excerpt from book — WARNING, the material is disturbing — Ed.)

….. Folks, I will grant you that this is a work of fiction, but it’s still a very strange and disturbing passage and are you going to try to tell me that a Senate candidate writing graphic descriptions of pedophilia and incest isn’t a story? Come on! It goes without saying that any Republican who wrote this sort of thing and ran for office would be absolutely ripped into a thousand pieces by the mainstream media. Meanwhile, the MSM isn’t even showing the people of Virginia these passages so that they can make up their own minds about how relevant they are.

That leads to this obvious corollary here in Ohio: If a GOP gubernatorial candidate had voted “Present” in a resolution condemning an attempt by a “professional” organization to make pedophilia look like not such a bad thing, who in their right mind thinks that Ted Strickland’s current media and other defenders, who are now saying that it isn’t even proper to bring Strickland’s vote up, wouldn’t be all over it?

Ankle Biting Pundits notes that Webb is also getting the see-no-evil treatment from the 527 Media.

UPDATE 3: From Ted Strickland at the debate last night (in the Dispatch’s report) –

Strickland said he agreed with most of the resolution but took issue with a portion saying children who are sexually abused as children could not become healthy, affectionate adults.

That has been covered, and swatted away. The language Ted Strickland refers to is not in what was “Resolved.” It was language from a Supreme Court decision in the “whereases.” The “whereases” were a recitation of various points, one of which referred to the historical fact of the Supreme Court’s decision.

Many of the 355 who voted for the resolution certainly agreed with Strickland that the Supremes’ “no prospect for healing” lauguage was over the top and agree that people can heal from sexual abuse suffered as a child, but nevertheless were smart enough to recognize that you didn’t have to agree with that language in the Supremes’ decision to support the resolution.

Why didn’t Ted? Because this one-minute speech had his REAL objections, the ones he didn’t DARE bring up in the debate, because of the arrogance and condescension that literally cascades from it:

(Mr. STRICKLAND asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. STRICKLAND. Mr. Speaker, it troubles me that sometimes in this Chamber we stand and say things that we ought not to say. We criticize people that we have no right to criticize.

We recently voted to condemn a scientific study and an organization, an organization that has done as much as any organization in this country to fight child abuse.

I wonder how many of us read the study before we were willing to vote to say that the methodology was flawed. I wonder how many of us were technically competent to make that decision.

I believe that we ought to observe the Ten Commandments. One of those Commandments says, you ought not to bear false witness against your neighbor.

When we say things about an organization or about an individual scientist that are untrue or unsubstantiated, in my judgment, we have violated that Commandment.

We ought to have the decency not to vote to condemn something until we know what it is we are voting to condemn.