I won't because I already know exactly how it went:

Nice. In addition to being funny it calls out an important general truth: that by adopting a right-wing worldview but offering watered-down versions of right-wing approaches, mainstream liberals lose the debate before it's even begun.

Maybe A Tiny Revolution could sponsor a debate with Krauthammer and Ferguson, who I guess would pass for the heavy artillery of the intellectual right, facing off against Noam Chomsky and Chalmers Johnson (who while not necessarily of the left is certainly an erudite critic of the folly of empire seeking).

MCCAIN SQUAD OUT-TALKS O'S

Look, anyone who writes a book about genocide and whose criticism of the U.S. is based on what it DOESN'T do to halt genocides, instead of what it DOES do to support, propel, and commit them, gets whatever she deserves.

Uh, that would be "deserves whatever she gets."

(mutter, mutter)

You should be glad she lost. It proves an important point: she was never one of us, and always one of them.

Maybe the situation we are in is addressed somewhat in this writing from a hundred years ago.....

June 11, 1908

Our American civilization is a strong one and a brave: it is marked by much energy and progressiveness. Looked at by and large it is the best. Yet it stands in need of fulfillments and complements, which our various climates and mixed races, it may be hoped, will eventually bring about. We have prospered marvelously in things and in spirit, but not as yet sufficiently in breadth, warmth, color, and charity. Our goddess of duty is still puritan, a cold white maiden with a lofty ideal, but with narrow sympathies, and with a soul all-budding yet not fully expanded and mature: it has the bloom , the optimism of youth and the hardness, the judgement of old age, yet it has many half-thoughts, is not of rich, ripe scholarship and lacks something of the deep interest that adversity, gloom and tragedy dower a nation with. There are some aspects undeveloped that would seem to need the touches of a tropic sun to bring out and mellow. She beckons onward and upward, but her noble face has a certain austerity, too fixed, inelastic and unyielding; its smile is constrained and not of universal joy; the countenance seldom expresses the subtle understanding, nor shadows and lightens tenderly, magnanimously, as with the mysterious, informing sense of sorrow, defeat and the ogre. In her presence one feels some want of frankness, of open mindedness, of wholeness, some lack of the freedom, richness, experience and comprehension of the great life. Happy thrice happy it is, that Christ was born an Oriental, at the vortex of the humanities, that the manifold trends of thought, of being in the complex situs of his manifestation found in him no harshness of discord, but a receiving, assimilating spirit, found in him, with mysterious grace and beauty, support, atunement and all-encompassing love.
When misdirection called or urged, he spoke not censoriously but with the seasoned modulation of great utterance, "Father, forgive them, they know not what they do."

Thank you for the opportunity to hear the debate. Ms. Power lost the debate because she never made a substantial statement. I had to play her comments over several times thinking I had missed something...I hadn't. Her criticism of the administration regarding Dafur boiled down to its failure to provide helicopters. Mr. Hobrook was not suprising. He obviously likes to talk both diplomatically...and about himself. The cons were obviously stuck in '06 regarding Iraq. They didn't convince me either.

Thank you for the opportunity to hear the debate. Ms. Power lost the debate because she never made a substantial statement. I had to play her comments over several times thinking I had missed something...I hadn't. Her criticism of the administration regarding Dafur boiled down to its failure to provide helicopters. Mr. Holbrook was not suprising. He obviously likes to talk both diplomatically...and about himself. The cons were obviously stuck in '06 regarding Iraq. They didn't convince me either.

Great. Cuddly imperialists versus steely-hard-glint-in-the-twitching-eye imperialists. Good to see both sides of important geopolitical issues getting a look in.

I thought you said there were liberals involved in the debate...

The worst thing is, I'd estimate there's a 20% or so chance all these fuckers actually believe their own crap. Obviously their assistants and assorted hangers on who feed them information and anecdotes don't.

Samantha Power is sort of stupid. Hate to say that cause she did write a fine book (A Problem From Hell) But she comes off as one of those earnest post graduate history majors who is surprised to find that not everyone agrees with her and can actually put together an argument. (I live in a university town and those types are legion around here)

Like a lot of them . she lacks any real experience on the ground and is easily put off her game by lizards like the Krautenhammer.

"A Problem From Hell" is good in some limited ways, but also shows what is wrong with Power. She writes a book on genocide and the US and her emphasis is on how American policymakers are too naive to fully understand just how evil some people are. To her (very slight) credit, she occasionally departs from this level of idiocy--for example, when she mentions that the bombing of Cambodia killed tens or possibly hundreds of thousands of people. (I think it's acceptable among some liberals to admit that Nixon and Kissinger might have been war criminals, just as Bush is today.) But for the most part she's far more comfortable flattering her center and center-left audience with the notion that their only problem is that they're just not imaginative enough to understand how bad people can be.

So we get a book on US policy and genocide and Guatemala goes unmentioned, and East Timor gets one or two sentences. It's not a coincidence that her pal Richard Holbrooke was in charge of policy towards East Timor during the Carter years.