Dartmouth Democrats Debate

I watched the "debate" (why do they call them debates when mostly they just answer questions and rarely debate anything?) tonight, and I'm only going to tell you one thing. Dennis Kucinich said we could have a president who was right on Iraq and right on the PATRIOT act, or we could have a president who's tall. I was with him until he also said he wants to lower the drinking age to 18 and the voting age to 16.

Of course, the old argument was there that if you're old enough to fight and die in the military, you're old enough to vote and drink, but I think that's bass ackwards. Neither the drinking age nor the voting age (although it already has been) should be lowered to match the military enlistment age of 18; the military enlistment age should be raised to at least 25. And there shouldn't even be a legal - and therefore illegal - drinking age. There should just be serious consequences for drunken activity that harms someone else.

As for voting - let's get a decent, fair, reasonable system before we start throwing more people at it. (That was easy, and gets me out of having to squeal about sixteen-year-old reasoning capacity.)

Update: I'll tell you one more thing, and the rest you can read at USA Today if you didn't watch. Tim Russert, the moderator, asked the last question of every candidate: What's your favorite Bible verse?

What in the name of the Constitution of the United States has that got to do with political issues and the presidency? At any rate, most of them didn't actually quote a verse, and Senator Biden is going to be in hot water with the Jews, because he said something to the effect that there are too many Pharisees. No matter what he meant, he's going to be really sorry about his choice of descriptors.