Pomona Debate on Healthcare Disappoints , Just As All Their Debates Do

I've come to realize that Pomona's PSU debate program is something of a joke. Its topics include religion, the youth, (yes: really!) immigration, and now health care.

In the religion topic, they picked an extremely liberal Christian to debate an atheist. (No Dinesh D'Souza here folks. Move along.)

In the youth topic, they picked one scholar and one rapper to talk about how great we are as a generation and how we're going to solve all of America's problems by growing the welfare state in new and glorious ways. (Is that before or after they tax us to death to pay for the generational Ponzi scheme we call "social security"?)

In the immigration topic, we had a radical, open borders enthusiast versus a protectionist. Both sides simply went through their talking points without addressing any of the substance of what the opposition had argued. (Of course, the debate ended prematurely with the pro-open borders, pro-illegal immigrant side shouting down the protectionist. So much for facilitating discussion. In fact, Pomona's students showed how poorly they see debate by founding a new group, W.O.R.D., which has worked to silence serious debate on the immigration issue.)

Now we have the health care debate. As Aditya already pointed out, this debate seemed doomed from the get go. To PSU's credit, they did mention that David Beier worked for former VP Al Gore and the House Democrats. What they did not mention is that his position argued before the Senate Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Intellectual Property was completely opposite to that of soon-to-be-President John McCain, whose position he purported to half-heartedly represent. His track record as a lobbyist is against free markets, not for them, and yet he represented McCain's position all the same.

Moreover, PSU's moderator in the debate referred to several erroneous figures during the debate, like the whole 47 million uninsured lie, which Sally Pipes exploded tonight at the Ath and in previous arguments. Although Beier suggested that that figure might be might lower, he gave no indication of just how low and was easily mopped up by Dr. E. Richard Brown, a specialist in big government health care bureaucracy.

We called them out for this in the comment section of Aditya's blog post. What we did not know at the time was just how crooked PSU's set up for the debate really was. For starters, Beier's own daughter brought him to speak on behalf of McCain. (It makes you wonder how hard Jenn really worked to find someone to represent McCain's position.) What makes matters even more problematic was that Beier brought Brown to the attention of PSU. In other words, Beier picked his own debate partner.

Towards the end of the debate, Brown suggested that we all ought to give a round of applause to Mr. Beier for defending the "indefensible" McCain policy. The audience dutifully complied.

As I left, I heard someone say how "civil" the debate was. Of course it was civil. Both "sides" were the same.