Most of the critiques of the debate are about Obama being slammed with a barrage of "character" questions, so it's especially relevent I'd say. Obama also criticized the moderators for not addressing issues of substance for 45 minutes. Also innapropriate--Charles Gibson, the other moderator, took a sharp detour from moderator neutrality and basically argued with Obama about the detriment to the economy that the raising of the estate tax has--a debatable concept at best, but stated as if fact. And the question about why Obama doesn't wear the flag pin...I can't even dignify that with a comment except WTF??
Secondly, what's up the Pope's red shoes?
Are they the official pope shoes? Do they get passed down from pope to pope? Or is the Holy See just a shoe enthusiast? Can't really blame him. But on another note, the Pope met privately with survivors of priest sexual abuse and also gave a speech apologizing and expressing shame over the scandals. It's good that he's addressing it, more than a lot of other Catholic leaders, like a lot of Cardinals who kept quiet for years. Yet, I also just have a hard time believing that almost any priest, cardinal, or pope could have been ignorant of child sex abuse in the priesthood decades ago. When the Pope was Cardinal Ratzinger, what was he doing about the abuse? Apparently after it came to light through the excellent and fearless reporting of the Boston Globe, which broke the story that became the impetus to the huge spiraling of sex abuse stories that have come to light over the last several years, Ratzinger was very angry about the abuse. But could he possibly have never heard about it? Lots of people knew this was going on, perhaps not to the enormous extent that it was, but regular Catholics new about it and it had gotten press from time to time over the last twenty years or maybe more. Even I knew about it years and years ago. I remember reading about it, in GQ I think, when I was a teenager. There was also a big trial in Dallas about 15 years ago of several former altar boys suing the Catholic church (and winning) over abuse. So, did a Cardinal who was not only in charge of dozens of priests below him and in touch with Cardinals around the world know nothing about these scandals that even I had heard of? It was bigger that most of knew, but I can't imagine that leaders in the clergy didn't know or didn't investigate further on the at least handful of incidents that they must have known about. Lots of Cardinals knew, famously Boston's Cardinal Law who kept it quiet and transfered offending priests to different diocese where they committed further abuse, so didn't Ratzinger also know of some of this? I guess my point is, it's good that he's meeting with survivors and addressing it publicly, but I think he's getting too much credit for it when he also should be acknowledging, as the Watergate question goes, what he knew and when he knew it. He can't just distract us with his shiny red shoes, dapper though they are.