political corruption conspicuously obvious to the casual observer...,

desdemonasdespair |  Clinton's answer was not bizarre. In a corrupt political system, 9/11 is the gift that keeps on giving. For 14 years now, politicians have deflected attention away from America's ubiquitous failures by invoking 9/11 and the threat of terrorism. It is astonishing to think that humans in Flatland are so psychologically dense that this obvious observation is only rarely made [video below]. But there it is.

And very conveniently for corrupt politicians, ISIS decided to wreak havoc in Paris in the 24 hours just prior to the debate. The entire first 30 minutes of the debate was about those terrorist attacks. It could have been worse.

In the hours before the CBS debate, Sanders' campaign team fought with CBS not to make foreign policy and national security the entire focus of the debate. And they succeeded, getting the network to dedicate only the first half hour to those topics.

When the debate began, the first prompt was for each candidate to give a one-minute opening statement specifically on the attack in Paris. Sanders' response to this was pretty simple: he dedicated two sentences to the attack and spent the rest of it talking about American economic inequality. He made no transition and no attempt to link the two.

But I digress.

Hillary Clinton—she was a senator from New York, for chrissakes!—didn't spontaneously play the 9/11 card when she was asked about her obligations to Big Money. Most everything Clinton says is well-thought out in advance. Hillary knew she would have to field this question, and gave us her rehearsed answer. Once again, it is astonishing to think that humans in Flatland don't understand this, but there it is.

And now a truly wondrous thing happens, not on the debate stage, but in the Vox report on it.