Well, shi*t. There’s 90 minutes of my life that I’m never going to get back, and I don’t have that many minutes left to spare. You know it was bad when Rachel Maddow kicked off the post debate coverage saying Thanks to the 20 people who actually survived the entire 90 minutes to join us now.
Niccole Wallace summed it up perfectly when she said, This debate was a contrast in two candidates. one of which was a smooth, practiced debater, who showed calm assurance, and he lost every single substantive point. She was speaking of course about the Hillbilly Imbecile, who was calm, collected, practiced, spent 45 minutes blowing false facts and figures out of his ass, and got his clock cleaned by a former high school teacher and football coach with facts on his side.
Here’s what sucked about that. As I’ve written before, in their first debate in 1980, Jimmy Carter mopped the floor with former Governor Ronald Reagan. He had every fact at his fingertips, and Reagan looked old, confused, and stumbled through his responses. But it was all a matter of perception. The mainstream audience expected to see a smooth, practiced, Hollywood movie star going up against a humble Georgia peanut farmer. And that’s exactly what they saw, and snap polls the morning after the debate showed Reagan the winner in a landslide.
And that’s the danger here. Unlike his idiot graven idol, Vance looked like an animatronic dummy on stage, blithely spouting out endless streams of immaterial bullsh*t. Walz was much more passionate and animated, taking Vance head-on with facts and figures. It’s all a matter of perception, and we’ll start to get poll results on that soon enough.
Actually, Walz did as good as he could do, considering that he was debating against a congenital liar. But he let me down in one point. Vance spent the entire night claiming that it was Harris who had wasted her last 3 1/2 years by not actually implementing any of the policies she is now pushing for a Harris term. I would have liked to hear Walz push back with something like, I’d like to remind everybody here that Kamala Harris is not currently the President, Joe Biden is. He sets the national agenda, not Kamala Harris.
But Vance stepped on his crank more than often enough to lose this debate. And that’s because he looked at it to be his job to protect Traitor Tot. And Walz kept slapping His Lowness down at every opportunity for his feckless leadership. And Beggar repeatedly took the bait, defending Trump’s actions no matter how indefensible.
Vance literally killed himself on abortion, and Walz hammered it home. I was surprised at how badly Vance f*cked up his immigration card, and gratified that the CBS moderators actually fact checked Vance on the actual legal status of the Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio. Vance fornicated the camine when he refused to admit that Traitor Tot lost the 2020 election, and stumbled again on the issue of the economy, citing Trump’s failed policies, and giving Walz a hammer to whack him over the head with.
I will admit this. JD Vance accidentally slipped up and showed some actual humanity. When the topic was gun violence, Walz, in his turn, related that his 17 year old son had actually witnessed a shooting while playing in a school volleyball game.Vance’s chin dropped to his chest, and he slowly shook his head. When it was Vance’s turn to speak, he acknowledged what had happened to Walz’s son, and sincerely expressed his condolences that his son had had to go through such a tragedy. Walz nodded his head and graciously acdepted the condolences.
MSNBC had their national reporter Jacob Soboroff at a watch party at Oakland College in Michigan, a county that had a 100,000 vote swing in 2020 that helped give Biden the state. And the results after the debate weren’t promising for Vance. He got clobbered on Springfield, slaughtered on the abortion issue, and tanked on the Trump tax cuts. And then a student stuck the shiv in deep, saying something like, Vance keeps blaming Harris for all of the failures of the last 3 1/2 years. I don’t think he actually understands what a Vice President’s duties are. Biden is the President. So for at least one intelligent person, Vance’s attempt to turn Kamala Harris into the Wicked Witch of the West fell on deaf ears.
I’m sure that we’ll have some snap polls in the morning, but it will take close to a week to have any substantive polling on who won the poll. But unlike the Harris-Trump debate, where Harris repeatedly forced Trump to make a horses ass of himself, this debate was so restrained and gotcha moment free, I’m not really sure anybody’s mind was changed tonight. Which is a pity, since Vance repeatedly recused himself from being qualified for the position of Vice President of the United States. We shall see.
I thank you for the privileve of your time.
“I’d like to remind everybody here that Kamala Harris is not currently the President, Joe Biden is. He sets the national agenda, not Kamala Harris.”
Yes, that struck me as well; also during the Harris/Trump confab at some points. Of course it’s true. But then I thought further. Walz can’t really say that, because then he would be seen as bad-mouthing Biden as well as admitting the substance of the accusations, which are largely bullshit anyway.
And even though the decisions weren’t hers to make, Harris has made it clear that she’s proud of serving with Biden, and that they are very close.
So for Vance that mode of attack was all too easy and he used it constantly. The real problem is that it contradicts the other Trump line that Harris was a clueless non-entity and did nothing for four years. If that’s true, how can you blame her for anything? In fact Vance blamed just about everything he could think of on Harris, and it came off as overkill to a ridiculous degree. At last Walz delivered the fatal blow, reminding everybody that the rosy picture of the Trump years was almost entirely fictional; in or out of office, he’s been the greatest internal threat this country has ever faced.
And that’s why there has never in living memory been such a coalition lined up to prevent the bastard from ever getting back into the White House.
Vance really is very smooth, very well spoken, an excellent debater — but in the end, what he’s arguing for is total fiction and everyone who’s not a convinced Trumpie, that is, the majority of American voters, is well aware of that. So E for effort, JD, you did a great job putting lipstick on a pig, but you’re still full of shit.
The real problem with that for Vance is that most people know she was the vice-president. not the president, and in any case for anyone not a convinced MAGAt
Well said! 👏👏👏👏
Any nation of voters who accept pathological liars whether they speak loudly or quietly is asking for doom at a time the earth is essentially showing the human race we’re not as important as we like to believe. Ask the folks in my home state of NC.
I think at the very least the von shitzi campaign wanted this to be a non-event they would not have to clean up after. So, on that level they must be ecstatic. If anyone was expecting fire and such from Governor Walz, they have not been paying attention to him or presumably anything else. The guy is a good guy, a competent guy, someone who gets things done without a fuck-ton of hullabaloo. That in and of itself is quite refreshing after the dumpster fires known as trump and vance.