The second leaders' debate

Last night's debate was even more depressing than the first.

The questions themselves were dire, and we have to wonder how many good questions were thrown out.

We saw a suffocating consensus on the EU and CACC (Catastrophic Anthropogenic Climate Change).

One line stood out to me, as Clegg tried to attack Cameron (of all people) as anti-EU. Commenting on the Conservative withdrawal from the Communist-sounding European People's Party, he accused Cameron of allying with

nutters, anti-Semites, people who deny climate change exists, homophobes

It was in the same spirit, if not quite as eloquent, as the immortal line from Canada's Dominion Elections Act of 1906:

no woman, idiot, lunatic, or criminal shall vote

We were also treated to Gordon Brown's continued lunatic ravings on the economy. He seems to really believe the Keynesian nonsense about government's power to "put money in" and "take money out" of the economy, as if its funds come from another plane.

Whenever it spends or borrows, the government uses money that could otherwise be spent or borrowed by the private sector, where it would deliver better value for money. And if the private sector would rather save some of the money, there may be good reasons for it to do so.

As Norman Tebbit laments,

No one bothered to ask why, if Mr Brown believed that inceasing taxation boosted the economy and not doing so took money out of the economy, he didn’t double NI contributions and give it a really big boost.

Hopefully we will see such questions raised in the third debate, though given his performance last night on the EU and the environment, I don't think we can expect any radical surprises from David Cameron. He really does deserve to lose this election.