The American Spectator

LAS VEGAS, Nevada — “Bulls — t.”

This was the answer editorial staff of the Rebel Yell, University of Nevada, Las Vegas’s student paper, shot back at the following self-posed rhetorical question in an angry piece: “This debate is obviously for the greater good of exposing UNLV to the nation, right?”

“Bulls — t,” they insist.

It would no doubt surprise the average viewer of last night’s Democratic debate to learn that even a college newspaper editorial writer could actually believe seven Democratic presidential candidates would come to argue politics, risking their entire careers with every pressure-cooked answer, primarily as an excuse to introduce the country to the wonders of University of Nevada, Las Vegas. It’s a nice campus, but…

Yet, the Powers That Be at CNN must nevertheless be wondering how, exactly, they became the enemy; or, in the Rebel Yell editorialist’s words, how the network had gone from a “once unstoppable force” to “an unstoppable farce,” a corporate harbinger of a “disorganized mess of security crackdowns and dog-and-pony show style theatrics.”

Didn’t these kids get the memo? CNN is cool, Daddy-O. Would a farce show up on campus in a tricked out sleek silver Airstream trailer to hand out free temporary tattoos, allowing students to decorate their bodies with bolder-than-Joe-Biden statements such as Independent Thinker and Express Yourself!? Or play bass heavy techno remixes of Charles Wright’s — yes, we have a motif — “Express Yourself”? Or a progressive politics-friendly magnetic poetry wall allowing them to ponder both simple (Be Yourself, Pro-Truth, Peace Me, Everybody Hope) and slightly more complex (Want Love Not Republican, I Am a Proud Educated Minority) philosophical ideas?

Of course not! All these kids had to do was read the flashing words on the video screens around the Airstream: Politics=Your Future. Picture of Wolf Blitzer. CNN=Politics. Add it up, slackers. CNN equals your future. So what if hardly any of you can actually get into the debate or the masses of police, Secret Service agents and heavily armed SWAT men kept the candidates safely insulated from you and turned your campus into something resembling a scene from The Kingdom, minus the turbans?

Maybe some free T-shirts would win the crowd over? Two CNN employees climbed atop the Airstream. “Who loves this song?” one of them enthused into the mic, “Express Yourself,” endlessly looped, blaring in the background.

“This song sucks!” someone shouted back.

Fine. Onto trivia for T-shirts. Which two presidential candidates are in favor of same-sex marriage?

“Ron Paul!” someone said — too confidently, it turns out.

“Hillary!” No. “John Edwards!” Nope, you’re thinking of his wife. Someone blurts out Kucinich and gets their shirt. No more guesses. “Sorry, guys, it’s Mike Gravel,” the CNN emcee says.

“Are you for real?” a girl in the crowd groans. “That’s an actual candidate?” The ignorance is not necessarily her fault. Mike Gravel was nowhere to be seen, unless that was him in the panda costume out front holding the sign reading, Pandering=Bad Pandas.

“Which candidate is a former senator from North Carolina?”

“Hillary!”