Mike Pence is gaslighting America

Anyone who’s that anti-gay, you just know.

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Ted Haggard Syndrome
http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/01/29/lkl.ted.haggard/

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GOP tweeted that he won the debate prior to the debate occurring. Post-factual world, indeed!

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If I were running for President, and was a person generally despised by the electorate, I would want a VP even worse than I was, as an insurance policy of sorts.

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Yep. It’s a huge advantage during a debate to be unhampered by facts. You can deny anything, say anything–and as long as you keep your cool you’re going to get that short term victory over the guy constraining himself to being (at least arguably) truthful. The ominous thing with these guys is they’ve shown you can avoid the long term consequences that in the past made telling such amazingly blatant, trivially-refutable lies a losing strategy.

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Bah. I still say The Tim Kaine’e eyebrows won the debate.

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Truth works.

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My favorite snippet is when Pence almost stumbled back into his talking point that Putin is “inarguably” a better leader than Obama, instead of saying that the quote was “inaccurate”.

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Ugh. Pence shouldn’t be in charge of a newspaper route let alone the worlds most powerful nation.

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I can’t wait for the next debate; I really hope Clinton gets Trump to say the very meta “I didn’t say I didn’t say that.”

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Hey, I think I smell gas! Something stinks, anyway.

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Linus and the Republicans, depending on a big orange fantasy that will ultimately screw them.

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Unfortunately that could lead to post-traumatic distress for the driver, and Pence isn’t worth that. Couldn’t you make do with a frozen lump of ice from an aircraft toilet hitting him at the same time as he was struck by lightning and a débris fragment from a meteor? Sending the case of beer to the universe would be a little difficult, I realise.

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It was, until they had to do something to stop the uranium, cadmium and selenium pouring out of the smokestacks. So - expect environmental controls to be the first thing to be repealed by a Republican government. Brown air is good for you! It contains healthy minerals - well, minerals.

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Oh, my goodness! Oh, my stars! A politician was found to be lying! Next it will be the media! Or even the Internet!!!

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I am aghast when people cite Fox as being part of the “Liberal Media Agenda”. How far Right does the political landscape go? I’m guessing somewhere beyond Hyborea and Thule.

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Most politicians don’t really actively lie - they passively don’t tell the truth, which one British civil servant described as “being economical with the actualité”. It is a bit different when one goes so far as to tell direct lies about easily verified things. In the same circumstances the response of normal politicians would be:
“I’m sure that Mr. Trump was making a rhetorical point here. What he meant was…”
“That’s a very interesting question. [so now I’m going to waffle about something unrelated].”

Pence can’t use the first option because clearly the Trump campaign has no fixed strategic document spelling out practical policies, to which he could refer. And in the circumstances (i.e. not just with an interviewer concerned for his or her career) he couldn’t use the second option. So he tried the third option - straight lying. This just shows how dysfunctional the Trump campaign is.

My halfpence* worth, anyway.

*equivalent of 2c worth in the days when the £ was still worth more than toilet paper.

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Far enough right to cite Genghis Khan as an example of a loony left wing SJW who, if elected, would leave American without defence.

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Still my favorite clip along those lines -

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At the very least the coal producing states had an active interest in still using it, regardless of environmental regs. And they kept doing so, regardless of those environmental regs. Until the fracking boom brought the price of natural gas to incredible lows. And oil producers over seas ramped up production and exports to compete with all that cheap natural gas. It’s why we were hearing so much about “clean coal” even during Bush 2: Iraqi Bugaloo. It already wasn’t competitive on emissions. But other options have gotten so affordable that even in a state regulatory setup that incentivizes coal over other fuels you can’t justify using it. So the coal states have started shutting down coal power plants at the same rate everyone else is. Swapping largely to cleaner and cheaper (with or without environmental controls now) natural Gas.

The GOP’s preferred policy of drill everywhere always and even more fracking BRO, would have just pushed that further and faster. The issue with Obama’s policy is there was a lack of follow through on the green energy transition. Natural gas got so cheap that everything started to switch to that, and an awful lot of wind/solar/etc development was back burnered. Initially fracking/natural gas was intended as a stop gap. A cheaper, more plentiful, and domestic fuel to run off of while we expanded clean infrastructure. The 2nd half didn’t happen at the rate it need to. And the 2nd half was supposed to supplant coal as the major industry in coal producing regions. It didn’t. Part of that is down to Republican and State level obstruction. Part of that is NIMBY shutting down wind and solar farms. But a big part of that is failure to realize how cheap and plentiful natural gas would skew the market. Which is the gist of what Hillary was saying when she made the coal gaffe that’s lead Trump to hammer on coal. We need to do more to drive those green energy projects. And we need to see them especially where old industries are being displaced.

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