The great debate

Poor Pirate Ballerina worked his tiny fused digits to the bone liveblogging the Horowitz-Churchill debate this evening, and it's good stuff. Some of the comments are sharp, too (mine are just whiny). The Rocky, meanwhile, touts the debate on its front page, and provides a link to their five-part series on Churchill. No post-debate story yet. As a wise man with a Moe haircut once (well, a few thousand times) said: Advantage: bloggers!

Update: "Churchill, Horowitz smack each other with kid gloves." The Rocky's M.E. Sprengelmeyer "plays" the dope:

Organizers billed the event on stage at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., as "Academia's Royal Rumble." The two combatants struck one another with the longest words they could find — many of them so long they would
not fit on a standard reporter's notebook.

Sprengelmeyer is definitely a standard reporter. He [Update: Or she! I have no idea what sex Sprengelmeyer is] continues:

In one colorful exchange, Churchill told a story about being in the eighth grade in Illinois in 1960, and casting a vote for the socialist candidate in a mock presidential election.

"I didn't know what a socialist was," he said. "It just sounded like a cool thing to do." He said teachers gave him detention for two weeks: "Now that is indoctrination."

That's one I never heard before, and typically convenient for Churchill.

Then Sprengelmeyer explains the Little Entenmanns essay:

Churchill was widely denounced for the essay, which called people who died inside the World Trade Center "little Eichmanns," and somehow complicit in a deadly U.S. foreign policy that inspired the attacks.

Somehow? Churchill is quite explicit on the point. Those who worked in the twin towers (except the night clean-up crews, I believe) were fascist hegemonist greedheads who polluted and impoverished the world to satisfy their lust for etc. Therefore they deserved what they got. Nothing's clearer. So Sprengelmeyer (I'm getting tired of typing that name) is either lazy or playing dumb.

Finally Sprengelmeyer gives his [or her! see above!] opinion of an incident during the debate:

Horowitz landed the least scholarly attack of the night, saying of Overland High School geography teacher Jay Bennish, "The point here is, that teacher is an ignoramus."

Why is that unscholarly? Bennish is an ignoramus.

Update: Rocky's headline for Sprengelmeyer's story changed overnight.

Update II: The Post's post-debate piece has the two-weeks'-detention-for-voting-socialist yarn, too.