Jack and Jill Politics, on the Fox debate.
Yet I have it on good authority that despite reasonable, dissenting voices, the CBC will press on with the event. The CBC's current plan of action is to try to convince the top three presidential candidates to attend the debate. They will send the candidates a letter urging them to participate, saying that this is not a Fox debate, that it's a CBC Institute debate, while also implying that the CBC debate is their only opportunity to speak to black voters and black interests.
So the plan is to pressure the candidates, dissemble and lie. Who do they think they are fooling? The debate would be hosted on Fox News as a co-branded affair from the Fox Theater in Detroit. So Fox is involved. Furthermore, this is not the candidates only chance to speak to black folks. Tavis Smiley has a Democratic debate lined up on PBS that happens to be DNC-approved.
This split in the CBC over the Fox debate is why I've been so careful about assigning the fuck up to the CBC Institute rather than the CBC. Black folks haven't been allowed to be political long enough to get it all right all the time. I expect errors, but I also expect folks to respond to the communities they claim to represent.
I don't want to cut down the tree when it only needs pruning.
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Well, as I wrote on Jack & Jill, I think we need
to email the candidates and congratulate them on not going. As well as calling.
They got in bed with those snakes. Let them get bit. Nobody told them to hook up with the White Citizens Council Network.
They got 12,000 pieces of communication against it. Tell me when they've seen 12,000 of anything concerning interest in the CBC.
Yet, they put up their middle fingers and went on with the insanity.
Speaking to Black Folks
The opportunities for presidential candidates to speak to the black electorate extends far beyond the CBC's scheduled farce event or Tavis Smiley's so-called debate. The candidates can speak to black voters every single day through, for example, the use of the Internet. In addition, they can link up with several black-owned blogsites and respond to questions posed to them by either the blogsite owners or questions submitted by users of those sites.
Black folks and presidential candidates have many, many venues available to them to discuss public policy issues rather than relying on televised so-called debates sponsored by friends or foes.