Mitt and Fred and Rudy and McCain and Huckabee and the rest

Well, I tried watching part of the CNN candidates debate that was on this afternoon, but it wasn't going anywhere so I gave up.

We're all waiting to see if Fred Thompson can still give speeches like he did back when he was a lobbyist, or if he is too used to parroting the lines writers have given him. It remains to be seen.

Also odd, I noticed, was the CNN "regular person" plant in the audience who...oh hey look, lost a child^† in Iraq. Lost a child in Iraq eight days before he was due to return home. I put this in bold primarily because CNN seemed to think it was important: they put it up on screen as a graphic during her question. With 6 month tours of duty (or less, in some cases), 8 days isn't a particularly ironic timeframe. Six months is about 25 weeks (the baseball season, as it happens), so 1/25th of all soldiers likely kick the bucket in the final week or so of their campaign. Even though there have been less than 4000 casualties so far, that still represents 160 guys who would likely have died in Iraq in their last week. It was so laughable, I never did answer the question.

^† Of course, I do read Mark Steyn, and know full well that its a little odd to be referring to guys in their 20s as "children", particularly when I live in a country that declares 14 year old girls to be sexually equivalent of 30 year olds.