Slow start

Presumably, the pace -- and the fireworks -- will pick up in the Republican presidential debate that just began.

But it's hard to imagine that the moderator, Carolyn Washburn, editor of the Des Moines Register, could have asked an opening question that would offer fewer distinctions among the candidates.

The query: Should the huge national debt be considered a national security problem? An important issue, to be sure, but hardly one -- especially when asked of a group of Republicans -- that would illuminate dramatic differences among the frontrunners. (Rudy Giuliani, though, did offer a nuance that the debt is more a matter of economic security; national security involves fighting terrorists.)

-- Don Frederick

Comments

[Tom]

That's the problem with Rudy - he's a little myopic when it comes to National Security. Considering China holds over a trillion dollars of our debt - that debt IS a national security issue. It's of course closely tied ot economic security - but if relations with China were ever to go south - they'd have a trillion dollars to hold over our head.

[Tannim]

Absoutely yes, and so is our energy problem! Both are areas that threaten our sovereignty, the debt because of the fact that if it's ever called in the nation becomes a serf to the note holders and we're all screwed, and the energy problem because we cannot seem to move away from burning carbon to produce energy, not to mention importing the carbon in the form of oil in the first place!