A series of (You)Tubes

I didn't really watch much of the debate last night because... well, because I'm pretty sick and tired of them. I tuned in for a couple questions here and there and found myself either terribly bored or terribly annoyed. Somewhere in the middle, for instance, I saw the candidates all try with varying degrees of success to pivot around the question: "Have the soldiers died in vain?"

It's the sort of question that has two different answers. One of those two answers is politically charged enough to be useful to Republicans, who will whip Democrats with it whenever they see an opening. On the one hand, soldiers have died when they didn't have to. In that sense, they died in vain. On the other hand, though, the soldiers have died doing, in many cases, what they signed up and were excited to do, and in that sense they did not die in vain. Those are both legitimate answers, neither of which can realistically be given in the form of a simple "yes" or "no".

It would have been possible to do this a couple of different ways, of course. For instance: "Has the president wasted the lives of soldiers?" That one seems pretty clear. Also: "Given that your Republican opponents will spin this into a question about the patriotism of our troops and others, how would you characterize the lives our soldiers have lost."

Instead, though, in the debates on both sides, we get question after question culled from oppositional talking points delivered as if they concerned matters of real substance.