The media has done what we've been saying it would do to create a horse race out of a slaughter.

[Mc Mike]

48. Agreed. It's all viewed through the corporate mass-media filter.

TPM did 2 pieces of analysis of CNN's debate take. They covered CNN's John Berman 'fact-checking' Romney's $5 trillion dollars in 'closed-loopholes' claim, where Berman 'checks' by saying 'if you take him (Romney) at his word', he has a way to pay for his tax cuts for the rich, so the claim that Romney has no way to pay for the $5 trillion tax cut is false. And TPM linked to CNN's 'snap poll' of the debate, which 'showed viewers think Romney won', where the sampling appears to be devoid of anyone who isn't a Southern white person over 50 years old.

The debate tape compilation of Romney continually talking over Lehrer, refusing to shut up or concede that his time is up, shows mass media's magic debate moderation deference. The repug candidate, who answered a total of 3 questions to his press pool during his disastrous 'foreign policy tour', is taking it to the press (the debate moderator), playing smash-mouth on the media for the edification of his yahoo followers. He usually is afraid to answer questions from the media, is much more comfortable telling millionaire backers what he truly thinks. But media must maintain debate decorum, unlike the typically weak repug candidate. The same 'level playing field' that promoted appearances of competence and competitiveness for Reagan, Poppy, Quayle, Perot, Stockdale, Shrub, McCain, Palin, is now being used for lame and lyin romney-ryan.

He gets caught telling the truth to his rich buddies, then debate media lets him tell simplistic lies aggressively for his rank-and-file followers, who understand power-dynamics in a way that even toddlers do. Then those unwashed masses proudly crow about their candidate's performance, and CNN will do a poll that shows the repugs' craven candidate 'dominated the debate'. Those rank-and-file fools will now be encouraged to loudly let us know their one-line take aways from this debate. That prospect isn't too intimidating for our rank-and-file, and the campaign is long used to executing triple-bank shots in the media to get around media's systemic problems.

Re Syria and Turkey, Turkey's military propensity to roll over international borders can't have escaped the attention of Syria's gov or the amorphous armed groups that are trying to overthrow it. Someone in Syria fired first anyway, wonder who it was.