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Well, That Was No Fun
Not only was it no fun, but it was disappointing all around, in my humble opinion. Like most people, I went into the first presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden knowing full well who I would vote for. Put simply, when one party has the support of rioters, looters, and thugs masquerading as people who care about black lives; illegal immigrants; people who actually believe there is a Constitutional right to stick a fork in a baby’s head; people who believe a nation can tax it’s way to prosperity; people who reject a person’s right to self-defense; and people who make sweeping judgments about a person’s character based on the color of their skin … that is not a party I will ever support. I’m more interested in actual governance than debate points, and as I said on my show last week, one party stands for the rule of law while the other stands for the rule of mobs.
Still, it would have been nice to get a productive exchange of ideas, even if pugnacious. But this was a fiasco in which no one acquitted himself well or did himself any favors. By way of full disclosure, I should state my own bias in favor of letting people complete a sentence. Particularly when the person trying to complete that sentence is Joe Biden because you can’t be sure in which direction he will wander, nor the extent to which he’ll make your point for you if given enough time.
The opening two-minute salvos from each candidate were intriguing, but I found it dismaying — purely from a debater’s perspective — that President Trump immediately began interrupting as the first exchange got underway, and he simply wouldn’t stop. In the first place, it’s exasperating for the listener to be unable to hear the point being made without incessant interruptions. In the second place, that kind of rudeness elicits sympathy for the person being interrupted, which is exactly what happened early on for Joe Biden. Lastly, that kind of thing gives the green light for your opponent to do the same thing, at which point it becomes a race to the bottom.
While I didn’t expect Donald Trump to be William F. Buckley Jr., I did hope he would make it easier for the listener to actually hear the sheer lunacy of Joe Biden’s policy prescriptions. Biden distanced himself from the Green New Deal, and yet his website states: “Biden believes the Green New Deal is a crucial framework for meeting the climate challenges we face.” He should have been pressed much harder on his refusal to rule out whether as president he would seek to pack the Supreme Court as FDR attempted to in 1937, prompting members of his own party to turn on him. Biden’s refusal to even provide the names of potential Supreme Court appointees in a Biden administration suggests that he knows that they would be so radical as to be unacceptable to a majority of voters. He should have been pressed hard on this by Chris Wallace, who didn’t pass up any opportunity to press Donald Trump on any and everything imaginable.
After challenging President Trump to denounce white supremacists, as he’s already done on numerous occasions and did so again last night, why didn’t Chris Wallace turn to Joe Biden and say, “Mr. Vice President, it hasn’t been white supremacists who’ve been burning cities, looting businesses, assaulting and killing police officers and citizens, sir. It’s been Black Lives Matter activists and Antifa. So Mr. Biden, will you take this opportunity to denounced those organizations?” That would have been the mirror image of asking Donald Trump to denounce white supremacists.
But Chris Wallace didn’t do that, and he won’t do that because it would require an objective perspective, something that Mr. Wallace and a great many media personalities find organically impossible. Mr. Wallace went on to frame both “the science of climate change,” and “critical race theory,” in euphemistic terms that accept leftist dogma as revealed truth, challenging Donald Trump to refute them.
“But sir, if you believe in the science of climate change…” Because who doesn’t believe in science, right? Except that a great many scientists refute the extent to which mankind has actually caused climate change and point out the extent to which “climate science,” has been bastardized to pursue political and collectivist goals. But note how Chris Wallace glides over those inconvenient facts and presses President Trump on whether he believes in “science.”
Then there’s this little maneuver:
Chris Wallace: “This month, your administration directed federal agencies to end racial sensitivity training that addresses white privilege or critical race theory. Why did you decide to do that, to end racial sensitivity training? And do you believe that there is systemic racism in this country, sir?”
Critical race theory, as Chris Wallace ought to know, is a decades-old intellectual theory that views America through the myopic lens of race, finding nearly every American institution and ideal to be both retroactively and proactively designed to benefit whites at the expense of everyone else. Thus, Center For Disease Control (CDC) employees were recently trained that they must “target” such things as the “narrow focus on the individual” and “the myth of American exceptionalism” along with “the myth of meritocracy” and “If you work hard you will make it.”
Those are the concepts under attack in a theory and program which Chris Wallace serenely describes as, “sensitivity training,” while asking Donald Trump why he would want to end it’s implementation in the federal government. It’s like asking someone, “When did you stop beating your wife?”
This is actually rather low hanging fruit, and l while would have hoped for a more comprehensive response from President Trump, I’m dismayed that Mr. Wallace so obviously betrayed his own bias by framing these and other questions in a fashion that simply excepts the faulty premise of leftist dogma as the flat-footed truth.
As for Joe Biden, I expected neither candor nor an honest recitation of history nor his own positions (see Green New Deal, above). I think he benefited by being able to string a few thoughts together in a more coherent fashion than his previous appearances suggested he was capable.
From reducing black unemployment rates from a high of 16.8 percent under Barack Obama to a record low 5.5 percent, to dramatic reductions in the poverty rate (prior to the pandemic), and from jobs returning to America to the obliteration of ISIS, historic Middle East peace agreements which both solidify Arab and Israeli relationships while isolating Iranian radicals, there is much to like about the Trump presidency. His biggest challenge in the remaining debates is to stay out of his own way. It’s tough, after all, to refute the other guy’s thoughts if you won’t let him express them in the first place.
Published in General
As far as “the science of climate change,” we aren’t electing a scientist-in-chief, and I doubt whether either of those two could connect up a set of jumper cables. That’s not the job.
Wallace is either ignorant, stupid, disingenuous, or some combination. I’ll offer no odds on that proposition.
Thanks for writing, Dave. The post perfectly describes what I thought and felt.
You must not have played the drinking game . . .
No, but I do recommend muscle relaxers.
Boil all the complaints of Trump’s interruptions down to this:
Trump should have let the media fact check Biden instead of doing it for them.
I have little respect personally for Trump, but thought he handled the series of questions on climate remarkably well. I wish there would have been more exchanges like that, and shows that questions with a loaded premise can be handled well and can score more points with viewers than softballs.
The question “Yes or no, did you only pay $750 in income taxes in 2015?” was the only truly terrible debate question, fit only for gotcha interviews and questioning a witness in a trial.
But it was ultimately painful to watch Trump badger Biden for 90 minutes and argue with Wallace before the question was read.
I hope President Trump can do better at exposing with clarification the Democrats’ efforts to portray their own acts as having been perpetrated by Trump voters. The several months’ record in Portland is a good example. The non-group Antifa has been rioting for months while the Leftist Democrats have publicly accused the Proud Boys or other groups who have opposed Antifa (those who do violence in support of ideas). In Portland many people rioting and committing violent criminal acts have been arrested for these crimes. One of the longtime Portland Antifa supporters murdered a member of the groups opposing them. Those arrested have been promptly released without being charged according to media reports. Does anyone believe if the people arrested for these criminal acts were Trump supporters or members of the Proud Boys they would have been released without being charged?
@davecarter, I found your article matching my views closely.
I have yet to be persuaded that the rioters, looters, and thugs vote.
The only people who think Trump did poorly are the people well enough informed to know what he could have said.
Which makes our critiques on his performance a poor proxy for how effective he was.
I also don’t think the debate moderation accurately reflected the rules. I re-listened to Wallace and found the published rules from the Debate Commission. It looks like they didn’t allow for any open discussion.
You don’t have to be well-versed in policy and ideological minutia to know that constantly interrupting someone is counterproductive. Respectfully, I’m not saying it did poorly all around. I am, however, pointing out that it could have been better.
A note pad and a pencil. That is what Trump needed. Immediate response to the lies might be emotionally satisfying, but taking Joe apart all at once is cumulative.
With respect, Stina, nowhere did I suggest that the media can be trusted to be anything other than antagonistic to President Trump, let alone suggest that they can be relied on to fact check Biden. I can simultaneously say that Chris Wallace did a poor job of remaining neutral, and that the President should have done a better job of reining in his interruptions, and point out that the media cannot be trusted. In fact, that’s exactly what I did. I’ve never had a problem with Trump, or Newt, or Fred Thompson, or anyone else refusing to play along with the little games that moderators like to play or calling them out in real time. That’s not the same as endorsing any debate participant’s constant insistence that his opponent not be allowed to finish a thought.
Your complaints seem to come with a different preconceived idea of the purpose of debate. Even old fashioned and what we have now have the same purpose – to persuade. So any kind of evaluation of the debate that only focuses on following rules and being polite (which apparently isn’t required for debates and never was) is missing the point.
And I want to reiterate that Trump didn’t fail with normal people, so his performance wasn’t as awful as we perceived it to be.
To heck with debates, Trump needs to start advertising on HGTV and TVland. I’ve been watching them and noticed lots of Biden ads. It happened last time with Obama/Romney. It is low information voter territory.
I actually laughed at some of the debate. To me Biden is an old, frail man. Yes, Trump was his own worse enemy, which isn’t new.
Objectively, we got a lot more out of Trump than Biden in that Trump was combative which means he was putting forth differing views from Wallace/Biden. I really liked his throwing up the attempted coup to Biden along with the information it was Biden’s idea to bring up the Logan Act right there for everyone to see. Biden was very, very weak on that.
I worked with a guy years ago who said he wanted to work for a company where the bigshots went out in the parking lot and duked it out, that they cared enough to do so. Maybe old fashioned but, I thought of that guy the other night.
Voting isn’t the only way to support. Far from it.
I wouldn’t want to work for, or have politics run by, whoever happens to come up with the strongest but stupidest fighter.
I didn’t enjoy the debate. I think POTUS has better timing and comedic instincts that were, for whatever reason, put on hold.
But there were a couple of positives.
-POTUS got Biden to deny the green deal.
-POTUS got Biden to state “I am the Democratic Party,” which I’m sure just thrilled Bernie, AOC, and their ilk.
-Biden: There won’t be a single coal-fired or oil burning plant built when I’m in office. That thud you heard were voters in Pennsylvania and Ohio dropping Biden.
-Interestingly, in a Telemundo poll, 65% of Spanish-speaking viewers that that POTUS won the debate. Problebemente para que nos Presidente esta muy macho.
So there’s some silver linings in there, if you squint hard enough to see ’em.
I also doubt they’re donating to the Democratic Party, volunteering for the Democratic Party, attending Democratic Party events, etc, etc, etc.
You mean you doubt that any of these cats are going to attend the Biden sock hop?
Maybe some. But 60 years of time on Earth leads me to suspect that most of those people won’t think he meant THEM, or something.
Kyle Rittenhouse fired three rounds and hit three felons.
I don’t think very many of them will clear security.
Don’t count on it. Not only is he honking off the miners, the mine equipment manufacturers employ a lot of people too. And those manufacturers have large networks of suppliers.
We can be optimistic. But it’s been my experience that Democrats want to hold onto being Democrats, more than holding onto their jobs. No matter how crappy the party and their candidates get.
I admit that I have only scanned the first paragraph so far, but already, mostly from the underlying tone I am getting, I must say I miss this guy from 2012:
and this one (also from 2012):
Seems he wanted a fighter.
I’d call that some kind of poetry.
And don’t forget “antifa is an idea” . . .
And he’s glad we finally got a fighter! That doesn’t mean that I (slipping out of third person gear) applaud when our fighter punches himself in the nose instead of his his opponent. The excerpts you quote were written after Mitt Romney lost, and he lost — in no small part — due to his inability to fight back and call out a moderator for reinforcing one of Barack Obama’s lies. So yes, it’s great that we finally have a fighter who has done more in three years than most Republican presidents accomplish in 8. But I don’t think it’s heresy to suggest that, at least sometimes, letting your opponent hand you the points you can use to lacerate his argument is not only smart, it’s necessary. But to do that, you need sound tactical and strategic exertions …something President Trump has used in the past and, as has been suggested in this thread, he should remember to use again.
Member @marcin this may be the answer in a comment from
Trump, Melania Test Positive for COVID-19
MarciN
I’m feeling like the smartest person on the planet right now.
Twenty years ago (which means I can’t find it today), I was up all night one night with a very bad cold, and I did what we all do when we can’t sleep: I went onto the Internet to pass the time. I looked up “colds,” and I came across a hilarious page written by a British doctor on what it means to get a “cold,” how we react. One thing he said that has stayed with me ever since is that we get kind of hyper the day before we start experiencing cold symptoms like a cough or a runny nose. That’s because our immune system yesterday realized there was a foreign invader and mounted a defense. He said it’s the immune system flipping on every electrical switch in the body all at once.
I did not watch the debate because I was working, but when I started reading the reports on Wednesday morning in which people were talking about Trump’s hyper behavior during the debate, my first thought was, “Uh oh, He’s got the virus.” (This virus acts like the “common cold” viruses in most ways.)
Wow, did I call that one. :-) :-)
I pray he and Melania recover soon.
I do too. Apparantly Schumer made some snide remarks about Trump being tested positive. I don’t remember his exact words, but the tone was “Nyah nyah.”