Honestly, the question-planting thing just doesn't strike me as interesting. Politicians rarely say anything worth hearing whether they're answering your questions or someone else's. On the scale of political sins, this is somewhere between mopery and forgetting to turn off the lights.
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Then the sin, obviously, is getting caught. All these other politicians manage to plant questions without getting caught ...
Question-planting isn't just a minimal venial sin--it's a positive virtue. Planted questions permit the candidate to say what they want to say about the issues they consider important. Far from being an abrogation of their obligation to address the issues, planted questions are a perfect expression of what the candidate thinks are the issues, which is more important--because once they're president, they have pretty wide powers to determine what they think is important.
If you really want something useful in terms of helping you pick a candidate, just tell them to pose themselves five questions that reflect *their* most important concerns.
There should be a way to get this post put on the streamer on CNN. It is not even amusing that a big deal is being made of it, and I find almost all of politics amusing.
Yeah, I kind of find this on par with McCain beng asked how he will stop "The Bitch" and then laughing at it. Who really cares?
Did Hillary prevent people from asking questions? No? Then it's just another way of getting the message out. Did McCain call her a bitch himself? No, then shut up news people. And, even a Yellow Dog like myself thinks what was said is funny. I'd actually have been more pissed if McCain gave a lecture to that woman about how bitch was an offensive term.
Don't plant questions! Plant trees!
Agreed. The sin, to me, isn't in the planted questions. It's in the rigid dichotomy where everything is either a softball, or a Wolf-Blitzer style "gotcha" question that does more to give CNN good embarrassing clips of candidates than inform anyone.
The question-planting just underlines how meaningless the entire process is. I don't even bother watching debates, speeches, or television news anymore.