The VP Debate: “A Damning Non-Answer” Understanding Who Won the Debate and Why

1. Immediate Response to the Vice Presidential Debate
   1. Immediate Takeaways:
   2. The Post Debate Spin
2. The Gaslight Prevention Brigade
   1. The Chaos of Trump’s Term
   2. The Sportification of Our Politics: White Identity
   3. The #COVID19 Pandemic Debacle is Disqualifying
3. Image Attribution

Well, shucks, y’all, this is the perfect storm of blogging: I’m available at the right time for a major political event in the US. Cambodia is twelve hours ahead of the East Coast, so it’s a decent time of the morning for me. I’m on holiday; it is Pchum Ben, the Cambodian harvest festival. I have a cup of coffee. And, I’ve got the split screen open.

I’m watched on NBCNews. The rules for the debate included the mics being on and no fact checking by the CBS moderators. It was up to the viewers to listen for the big lies and non-answers, but the moderators snuck a fact-check or two in their on their own both directly — Climate change is real — and indirectly — What evidence do you have that undocumented immigrants are driving up housing prices?

There is no need to rehash quotes and points made during the debate. Every major and minor news organization, blog great and small, and social media feed will be lousy with that stuff. This post will be divided into two parts. First, my immediate impressions written after the debate, including how the parties were trying to spin it. That’s always an eye opener. And second, reminding everyone of how chaotic, destructive, and awful the Trump years were. Vance tried to gaslight us, but we can’t let them keep us from remembering just how bad the Trump years were.

Immediate Response to the Vice Presidential Debate

Immediate Takeaways:

Here are the things that I took note of during the debate. The moderators did a good job of keeping it moving and keeping the candidate to their time limits. They even cut the mics the only time Vance tried to bully them into allowing him to spread more disinformation, just not quickly enough. Here’s a good fact check of the debate.

• Vance spoke slowly, clearly, and hit all of his talking points. He reiterated his points over and over again. Things that were notable about his performance overall:
  • He acquitted himself well.
  • He humanized himself by mentioning his children, his wife, his upbringing, and middle class-working poor roots as often as humanly possible.
  • He emphasized the positives out of the Trump years being careful not to use any material that could be easily fact checked, like the Minnesota abortion law stating doctors not being required to provide medical care to infants surviving attempts at late term abortion.
• Walz spoke too quickly and didn’t leave time for his points to sink in before moving onto explanations. It was like he couldn’t get the words out of his mouth fast enough.
  • Although, he calmed down during the debate and got his legs, he had too much to say about each point and ended up rushing through his material.
  • He didn’t land his punches when Vance would make some ridiculous claim about Trump achievements, for example, rising wages and low unemployment.
  • He was too much Minnesota nice and not enough “Mind your own damn business!” He didn’t speak plainly and clearly enough. He needed to name names and state clearly and succinctly what Trump did.
• Vance’s big lies won’t hurt the campaign, but they are jaw droppingly laughable:
  • Donald Trump saved the ACA in a bipartisan way. Several people probably laughed themselves to death after that one.
  • Doubling down on the Haitian immigrant thing: “We weren’t going to fact check, but since you just fact checked me…” He admitted that he lied, and then went on to lie some more until the mics were cut.
  • There was a peaceful transfer of power on 20 January… after all the violence on the 6 January Insurrection was quelled and the inauguration was secured with fencing and the national guard and Trump didn’t attend. Power was transferred in spite of Trump and MAGA, not because of him.
  • He claimed he never supported a national abortion ban when he has been widely quoted as saying (emphasis mine), “I CERTAINLY would like abortion to be illegal nationally.” This one will not only haunt his dreams but the campaign.
• Walz missed many opportunities to tag him with disinformation, for example the first amendment discussion. Vance was making a big deal out of social media not allowing misinformation to be posted claiming that it was censorship. Walz tried to use the fire in a theater line about limiting speech, but it didn’t come off very clearly.
• Vance became more “likable.” I feel dirty just typing that, but I think it is true.
• Walz won on substance, which matters less than style.

The Post Debate Spin

Immediately after the debate, coverage shifted to the spin room where various surrogates try to influence impressions of the debate. It can give you a clue as to how well or badly each side thinks their candidate did. The first two spins from each side:

• Republicans: Walz said he was in HK during 1989 Tiananmen Square. That’s the strongest thing they got? I mean, seriously, if that’s the thing you’re trying to emphasize coming out of the debate, especially, when Walz stumbled around a response and then finally cut himself off and said, “All I said on this is that I got there that summer and misspoke on this. I will just — that’s what I said, so I was in Hong Kong and China during the democracy protests.” Who could vote for that guy after finding this out?
• Democrats: During their discussion about threats to democracy, Walz turned to Vance and said, “Did Trump lose the election in 2020?” And, Vance did his best Tiny Tim imitation and tip-toed through the tulips. While Vance tried to push back, “That was a damning non-answer,” response by Walz stuck. Democrats are right to get us focused on this response.

The Gaslight Prevention Brigade

Vance did a good job of using half-truths and avoidance to focus on the few good outcomes from Trump’s term in office. The big mistake everyone continues to make is not to tie Trump’s disastrous reaction to the #COVID19 pandemic to the economic calamity that ensued afterward and the tremendous unnecessary loss of life.

Let’s take a stroll through the achieves to remember just how bad it was.

The Chaos of Trump‘s Term

It was so bad that I documented it blow by blow for the first two years Trump’s reign of error.

• First, on the The Unproductive, Malignant, Narcissism WATCH page from 23 August 2017 to 7 January 2018 when I realized that a page was just not the best way to organize these entries. But, check it out. It is very illuminating with its 24 updates as I added evidence of the Old Felonious Authoritarian Rapist Traitor’s (Old FART) behavior and categorized it with each part of his diagnosis.
• Second, I created a category of The Watch to collect individual posts about all the crazy crap that Trump was doing. Those ran from 12 April 2018 to 20 December 2018 when I realized that that was all Ye Olde Blogge was becoming. Well worth the perusal to remind yourself of how gawdamn awful the Trump years were.
• And third, Trump lost a carrier group because he refused to learn the chain of command. Literally. No one knew where the USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier was because Trump, the Commander-in-Chief had SAID he had ordered it to the waters off Korea, but, in reality, he hadn’t actually made the order, he just said it.

The Sportification of Our Politics: White Identity

The increase in political violence, the calls for revenge, the promises of retribution can all be traced to the sportification of our politics. We no longer view politics as a process in which we all can win or even get something that we want. We now view politics as a zero-sum, winner-take-all game. It runs on anger and division. It’s the only way that Trump can win. It’s another topic that Ye Olde Blogge has covered in spades:

• All the Anger, All the Time. In perhaps one of the clearest explanations of how we got into this Trumpian mess, I review an interview with Tim Miller to flog his book, How I’m Grifting Off the Left Now that I Can No Longer Grift off the Right Why We Did It: A Travelogue From The Republican Road To Hell. #Spoiler: It was all eyes wide open purposeful. They completely rejected any notion of appealing to any other community other than conservative rural Christian white voters.
• MAGA Treats Dems Like Foreigners. One of the most damning achievements of Trump and MAGA is that they treat us like foreigners: dirty, diseased, and disgusting. It justifies violence in the name of defending your way of life.
• Mass Psychosis is the End Game of Groupthink, Gaslighting, and Cognitive Dissonance. By immersing us all in this endless stream of anger, anxiety, and fear, we bathe our brains in cortisol (a neurotransmitter produced when stressed), which then reduces our ability to think clearly. It sets us all up to believe any lie that feels good or right. It is why Trump is constantly on about grievance and has to keep driving the outrage higher.

The #COVID19 Pandemic Debacle is Disqualifying

How can anyone not tie Trump to the pandemic disaster that we all lived through? All of our economic hardships that we have all carped about came about because Trump refused to do anything about #COVID19 other than force states to compete for federal aide and claim credit for things that he didn’t do. Other than the 6 January Insurrection, it is the single most disqualifying thing he has done. As Vance kept saying, trust him to do it again: the insurrection and the disaster of #COVID19. Here’s all the reminding anyone should need:

• Making Explicable the Inexplicable: the Waves of the #COVID19 Pandemic are Natural Waves of Terror. You remember the #COVID19 pandemic, right? It was that time in American history when a terrible disease was ravaging the land and Republican governors and citizens refused to do anything the EXPERTS — remember JD Vance rejecting the advice of experts? — said would help mitigate its toll and stop its spread like wearing masks and getting the vaccine?
• Life Expectancy Fell by 1.9 Years! Do you know how many data points have to change in order to change an average of 350 million data points or to put it more bluntly, how many real live dead Americans have to die before the average life expectancy of all 350 million of us is reduced? The scientific term is a a fuck load. Do you remember the refrigerator trucks outside of hospitals holding all of the corpses we couldn’t process? The field hospitals we had to set up to handle the case loads? The greeters in Walmart getting punched for asking people to wear masks? Do you remember any of the horrible fucked up shit that happened in America because of Trump’s total in ability to cope with the #COVID19 pandemic?
• #COVID19 Exposed Trump for What He Is. Trump is an unproductive malignant narcissist, which means he didn’t have the skill set necessary to respond to a crisis like #COVID19. He is all about the immediate and short-range. He is a counter-puncher. He reacts. As Biden showed us with the immediate turn around he and his team started on 20 January, it takes vision, discipline, and empathy to respond to a pandemic. Trump has none of that.

As Tim Walz said in his close, when someone tells you who they are, believe them. Trump has told us who he is. He’s demonstrated it. He tattooed it onto our forebrains.

Electing Trump is group suicide.

Image Attribution

This image was found on FoxNews using a DuckDuckGo using an any license image search. I do not own this image, it is not licensed for public use, and I don’t make any money off of its use in spite of the ads on the site. I will remove it if asked.