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Notes -
I want a vice presidential debate top level post.
So JD Vance sounded pretty good here overall. If you ask me, both speakers were miles ahead of their presidential candidate counterparts, which is sad. There is probably a lot that can be read from the debate, but I did want to discuss a couple moments making waves on other social media. First I will mention I was surprised to hear JD Vance support nuclear energy, and I will also mention a lot of people were probably unhappy with how he handled the gun control/mass shooting question. But back to the two I wanted to mention
The first such moment originated from a fact check:
Tim Walz responds to his statement, and then a debate moderator comes in with this:
I will cut it off there to not balloon this post. You can read the transcript here.
It seems many blue tribers saw him complaining about a fact check and seeing a win. Why would you complain about fact checking other than if you were lying? This is another example going back to Scott's post about the media rarely lying. Hey, they're temporary asylum seekers, so since they were allowed in with little hindrances to speak of, they're legal. Fact checked. This is an example of why I tend to dislike fact checking in a debate. It introduces an opportunity to use unfavorable framing on an opponent with lawyerspeak on technically true things. Let the candidates do it themselves if they want.
Next up, the January 6th and failure to concede the election:
Once again, there is more to this exchange than that. I said earlier that they had good performances, and I'll go further here and say that JD Vance had a pretty great night. I'd never heard him speak before and he sounded very well spoken, very well informed, and brought up many issues that I so dearly wished that Donald Trump would have brought up, like specifically naming the asylum system and mentioning the partial birth abortions allowed in Minnesota (I noticed Tim Walz's denial was not fact checked). That is to say, JD Vance is competent and might have won against Kamala Harris, representing a return to civil debates and "normal" politicians, despite the "weird" allegations.
But he is really dragged down on this issue. It's lame he has to defend election denial claims in the first place, and leave room for challenging more later. I know many of you have strong feelings on the truthfulness of the claims. I will say this: if someone goes and makes those claims, they shouldn't run again. That is very powerful ammo for the other side. And it's far from the only ammo. I am very disappointed with the rhetoric Trump throws around. His lashing out against Taylor Swift reads as totally pathetic. And it is sad to see someone with as much talent as JD Vance have to try to slip around all this crap coming at him, from both Tim Walz, the debate moderator, and untold amounts of unhappy people on Twitter.
"That is a damning non answer" is hilarious coming from Walz.
Walz' response (bolding is my own):
Followed by this absolute banger from the mods;
Tim Walz is the politician you get with a highly censored and early prototype ChatGPT. You can see that he's snatching bits and pieces of talking points and stringing them together in loosely probabilistic ways, but there's no coherence. It also lacks that wonderful post-modern impressionistic word salad of both Harris and Trump.
The Democrats really love doing this. Back with Hill Dog, they chose Tim Kaine and, IIRC, leaned in to calling him "America's Dad." Walz pick reinforces something that's obvious but hard to see - the Democrat party is absolutely loathsome of effective masculinity. A squishy assistant football coach who was part of the National Guard (but never deployed) is just fine. Or a "technically I was in the Navy!" gay dude. But an actual Man with hard coded male sensibilities is a non-starter.
I think the election is mostly back to a 50/50 toss-up, with some big risks for Harris (the longshoremen strike and fallout from Helene being the first of the October surprises). What is not a 50/50 toss-up is the relative Male-Female support. Regardless of the winner, the exit polls are going to reveal a societal level bifurcation at the sex level.
What's technical about it? He was in the navy, he was even deployed. Sure, he was only deployed for seven months. But it's not like he exclusively sat on the base. Maybe you can say that driving around kabul is not that dangerous. And since it's the navy, we shouldn't hold his homosexuality against him.
See my previous post in detail
Also,
Are we really sure about this?
For a time it wasn't. I had a buddy who accomplished the objective of eating at every pizza place in Kabul.
If that’s not hope for a cultural victory, I don’t know what is. God bless America.
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I mean are we even sure that Buttigieg was not grown in a vat? I wasn't present at his birth, personally. There's very little that we're sure of once we get right down to it.
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