Thrilla in vanilla #18

Okay, who won?

I'm watching the panel on MSNBC, and Matthews and Andrea Mitchell are smacking down Edwards. Ron Reagan Jr. is savoring the last 9 seconds of his second helpings of 15 minutes of fame...

Here's my take:

The clear winner of tonight's debate is Gwen Ifel. She kept the pepper spray out, didn't serve up any tee-balls, and went at both their jugulars. There's just something about Jim Lehrer's deer eyes in the headlight style that annoys the heck out of me.

I thought Edwards' best line was at the beginning when he ran with the Paul Bremer stuff. To me at least his lines were too repetitive of Kerry's---seemingly word for word. And the five mentions of Halliburton I'm sure was steak sauce for the left's tofu, but I'm not sure how that registers with the undecideds. The danger for Edwards was in passing the "can this guy really be president?" test, and when Gwen nailed him with the "what experience do you have to be president?" question he fumbled it. I mean, you can see why Edwards made so much money as a trial lawyer: he comes across as an extremely pissed off crusading Tony Dow.
(ie "Gee, Lumpy, the Amerikan people are not going to sit by while you sell nukes to Libya. Stop, or I'm going to tell the principal!")

Cheney had to do two things: whack Edwards and Kerry harder than a meth crazed biker knocking up a whack-a-mole machine, all the while not looking too much (or more than usual) like Mister Potter foreclosing on the poor old Bailey Building and Loan. You can just see if Dick Cheney were a hit man, he would eschew the sawed off shotgun in the violin case, the baseball bat, or the clean 45, instead going for the stileto, or better yet the garrotte around the neck. He's the Luca Brasi of the Bush Administration.

He did the former, lighting the good Senators up like a tilted pinball machine. Did he avoid the latter? I'm not a good judge of that, as I was kinda looking for him to whisper in John-John's ear "George Bush sends his greetings." But hey, that's just me, Mister Vegas.