I tell myself I dont believe a word in the mainstream media. I sat down to watch the Reid-Angle debate thinking myself free from that little curling-lip sneer of contempt that Chris Matthews has when he talks about Sharron Angle. But you know what? I was resigned. I know she's right and he's wrong but c'mon guys, this is a housewife from Ely, Nevada going up against the Senate Majority Leader.
Have you even been to Ely, Nevada? Its small. Its real small. The big bragging point is that its right near the largest open pit copper mine in North America. The only time I went there I took a great panorama of the copper mine but no shots of Ely itself. A couple of tiny casinos, a couple of legal whorehouses; other than that it could be any small western town. Bigger than Searchlight, I'll grant you that, but to my urban eyes Ely is a tiny cow town.
So this Ely housewife has the audacity, after twenty or thirty million bucks worth of ads branding her as a mental defective, after Chris' rolling eyeballs and contemptuous curling lip, after the news media highlighting every stumble, every slip and weaving the tapestry of a mentally-challenged extremist lunatic; after all that this woman has the temerity to walk onto the stage with the third most powerful person in a country of 300 million people and debate him? I was prepared to weep. To explain things away. To be charitable. But my heart sank at the thought of what I was going to see. The Big Lie wins again and control of the Senate is lost. Chris' curling lip had gotten to me. I live in LA. I'm way closer to Chris than I like to think.
But Mama Angle walked into the Debate Kitchen and opened up a family-sized can of Whuppass and she served it to the mighty Majority Leader piping hot. From being resigned to Angle losing and hoping against hope that she would do well enough to survive I began to feel sorry for Harry Reid. Yes, you read it, I felt sorry for the guy. It was like on the elementary school playground watching the class sissy get beat up by one of the tough girls from one of the upper grades. I literally couldnt believe it! She didnt take any of his crap.
She whupped him, she whupped him bad. There wasnt one single Harry Reid moment in the entire debate. This was the Rodney King beating, debate-style. Watching Harry, quivering like my chihuahua does in the vet's waiting room, twisted onto the podium like he needed a giant dose of Preparation H, trying to run away from himself, was painful. He didnt take credit for any of the last four years. Or blame. You would have thought that the guy who was on the air in commercials every five minutes on every channel talking about how Nevadans needed the influence of a powerful man in the Senate would at least admit that he had occasionally visited the place. He was like one of those career criminals who infest MSNBC after the commies go home, guys that describe the crimes they've committed in the most neutral terms, as though they had only observed that a 7/11 had indeed been robbed and somehow a bullet had found its way into the clerk.
The two big zingers were the one about Social Security and the one about how Reid made his money. Sharron Angle turned to that weedy, lying, Uriah Heep-like varmint as he toted out the shopworn liberal lie that she wanted to take away every senior citizen's Social Security checks and told him to fess up about the theft of a trillion dollars from the so-called trust fund to pay for his giant useless government programs. She painted that low-down weasel as the Bernie Madoff of Social Security and she did it in hot colors. She said it mad! Man up you skinny little chicken...you stole everybody's money! I dont remember his answer. Who cares what he said? This was reality TV at its finest! Sharron Angle is the Snookie of politics!
Then she said it. At first I didnt believe my ears. I know Reid didnt believe his ears. If this had been a fight the referee would have stopped it. No one ever dares to ask big time politicians this question...'How have you managed to become one of the richest men in the Senate on the government salaries you have earned all your life?' Willie Brown lived in a mansion, drove a new Porsche and wore $1000 hand-tailored suits on his income of $40k per annum and nobody ever asked him that question. Reid's eyes bugged out. He looked like he had gotten his wing-tip stuck in an electrical socket. It was Dan Quayle after Lloyd Bensen said, "You're no Jack Kennedy."
"That was a low blow..." he gasped before he explained that he was lawyering and investing in his spare time, dontcha know. See, the guy that not only read the danged Health Care Bill but wrote all 2,000 pages of it and wouldnt let anybody else see it until after they voted on it, Mr. Obsessive Knit-Picker Detail Man has got plenty of time on his hands and he uses this spare time to earn hundreds of millions of dollars. Thats like one of those ads that used to be on the backs of comic books; 'Earn Thousands In Your Spare Time.' Harry's the right age. Maybe he clipped that coupon, mailed off his $1.98 and got the secret to earning huge amounts of money in his spare time. And I thought I was so smart not being dumb enough to send my meager allowance off to an obvious fraud. An obvious fraud like Reid's answer. We all know how he got rich...he's a crook, that's how!
None of the rest matters. In those two magic moments Angle paid Reid back for every insult, every attack ad, every lie he tells about her. The curled lip the next day on Chris Matthews' face was for Reid, not Angle. The panel shook their heads solemnly. How could Reid let himself get sucker-punched like that? And then silence. How could this have happened? He got into a debate with a media-certified retard...and he lost! You can tell how badly she beat Reid by observing that within 24 hours of the debate there was almost total media silence about the debate or the candidates. The state of Nevada disappeared from political maps behind the noble commentators.
Too late. Angle has destroyed the narrative that Reid and his advertising geniuses had spent tens of millions of dollars constructing. His aura of competence was destroyed as was hers of extremism. She asked the questions any person would want to ask one of these big shots, and now one of us got the chance to do it. I was convinced Angle would win the election before this but she could have lost the debate and the election. It took a lot of guts to come at Reid like that, not many people would have been able to keep it going the whole time. A miracle might still save Harry Reid but no one will ever be able to say that Angle didnt have the Mighty Majority Leader whining and on the ropes. You go girl!
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