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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.
CNN wants Harris to win and will do everything they think they can get away with to make it happen. The same could be said of all establishment media. I'm not sure what else you expected.
I will say in response: the 2020 election was clearly and obviously stolen, and then Time bragged about "fortifying" it. It was not the first stolen election in my lifetime, and I doubt it will be the last. To see people still clutch at their pearls over this is asinine. To see it on this board is tiresome. Simply repeating that I shouldn't believe my own lying eyes, and shaming me for refusing to bow to your pressure, might work on some people, but it doesn't work on me.
And why shouldn't they run again? So you and yours don't have to see them, or hear their complaints, or address their concerns? So that the manufacturing of votes and stealing of elections can go on unimpeded?
Not that I am particularly interested in this discussion, but I guess somebody has to ask it: what do you mean when you say the 2020 election was stolen and what evidence do you have beyond some local shenanigans here and there that most certainly didn't flip the outcome?
Tangentially, IMO both sides got the response to claims of election shenanigans totally wrong, going into tribal mode rather than civic mode.
Whether or not there was actual fraud, there was pretty compelling appearance of fraud in the seemingly sychronized one-way anomolies that took place on election night. Rather than carefully investigating claims of impropriety and producing explanations that assauged concerns, the winning side took the very Trumpian approach of declaring fraud impossible in the most secure and perfect election ever held, coupled with a slate of articles condescendingly headline with the following template "No, xxxxxxxxx didn't happen, you fucking MAGA retards!" (OK, that last part was implied rather than stated directly.) It seems to me, as someone who voted for neither Trump nor Biden in 2020, that there were ample claims of shenanigans that deserved sober investigation, and sober investigation was never produced. The losers, on the other hand, thanks to grifters who saw they could profit off an atmosphere of polarized suspicion, threw every possible crazy fraud theory into the mix and then threw the stupidest tantrum in American history on Jan. 6. Trump was a terrible figurehead for a cause that could only possibly succeed with a careful and precise and civic-minded legal approach. I don't think the winners were ever capable of entertaining the best evidence of fraud and the losers were never capable of producing it.
Couldn't agree more. And I might be unfair to @KMC, but @ymeskhout did a pretty good job attempting (and in my recollection, succeeding) to dismantle quite a few of the fraud claims to a degree I am not able to reproduce here. It just irks me when people put forth a hugely controversial claim that has been discussed ad nauseam on this forum and pretend it's an obvious matter of fact. This is a debate forum, debates should have consequences. If we all just go back to our previous claims as if nothing happened, what's the point? It just means the most stubborn win out, as opposed to those with better arguments. It's sadly a strategy some posters here employed to great effect, including our resident "revisionist".
To be clear, that last bit isn't directed at KMC. It's just something that annoyed me for a while now and I might be unfairly projecting my grievances onto him.
Yes, that's how I feel about people declaring 2020 as the most secure election ever, and saying that people who question it are not fit to hold office. My stubbornness is a reflection and response, as well as my own nature.
Cards on the table, the next two most obviously stolen elections I know of are 2004 (the other one in my lifetime) and 1960.
Our elections are insecure. The Democrats appear to have benefited from that insecurity, and are obviously preventing necessary and reasonable methods to increase security. Until there is some contrition from the left, and concessions on election security, I will continue to be stubborn, and continue to insist it was obviously stolen, if to no other purpose than to remind people that it is not settled and there is no consensus.
Caesar's wife must be above suspicion.
How was the 2004 election stolen by the Democrats?
I never said it was stolen by the Democrats.
It was the Ohio electronic voting machines that stole it for Bush.
Ah, given your repeated emphasis on how democrats need to apologize, I interpreted you as meaning they stole that one too
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