Jesus - he’s actually on fire at the event right now.
Fuck on your timing, Joe.
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They serve all sorts of great breakfast foods, too. Don’t let the name fool you!
I recommend the hashbrowns!
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Right? Where was that Joe? Doesn’t this just fuel speculation from the far right that he’s on stims? But then the question i would ask them is “Why wasn’t he juicing last night?”.
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Still prefer a president who needs a dayquil opposed to one who needs a parole officer.
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Expanded polling locations, more voting days, national holiday on election day, mandatory voting.
Mandatory - Maybe just give everyone $20 when they cast their vote if you don’t want to fine or punish those who do not vote. A carrot instead of a stick.
Our problem is, one of our current parties doesn’t want more voting or more voter participation. They know they’re unpopular and that more people voting is bad for them. They’re counting on (and suppressing) people to reduce voter turn out.
When I was younger, it took me a while to figure out why “Get out the vote” campaigns and other PSA ads promoting that people vote were seen as partisan. Even when they were only promoting voting for someone and didn’t suggest who.
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AIUI, part of the rules stated that the moderators were not permitted to fact check the candidates in real time. So they pretty much had to let the lying liar lie.
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CNN shouldn’t have hosted under those conditions.
Certainly with those conditions, instead of that stupid round table and babble for 2 hours after the debate, CNN should have lead with correcting all the lies.
As it stands now, CNN gave validity to all the lies as if they were true. Which lines up with the roundtable, I’m sure I heard a panelist say facts don’t matter.
Why should anyone ever trust another CNN broadcast again? Clearly they are fine broadcasting lies.
Knowing those rules, and knowing Trump. The Biden campaign should have planed correctly.
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Automatic voter registration and vote-by-mail. These simply bypass most mechanisms for voter suppression.
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Maybe so, I don’t really know. I more or less checked out a few minutes in when a gleeful Scott Jennings or David Urban (or maybe both) started claiming that Biden’s press secretary was an outright liar comparing Biden to a post-stroke Woodrow Wilson and insinuating that Kamala Harris was actually secretly running the show (because nothing’s worse to these people than a Black woman running the show).
I totally agree. Dale noted Trump had over 30 falsehoods – and they were almost all outright lies and fabrications. Biden had 9 falsehoods, most of which were misstatements of figures he later corrected. (He said $15 insulin when it’s $35 and never mind the fact he corrected himself later.)
Pretty much. The moderators should have done something versus giving Trump an open mic to say whatever he wanted without consequence. About the most that was done was to say, “you have time left, do you want to actually answer the question now?” I can’t help but think one of the debate conditions was that the moderators could not challenge anything the candidates said because if that wasn’t the case this is practically journalistic malfeasance.
I agree. I feel like much of this “panic” is overblown by the media to drive views and engagement. Yes, the debate was a disaster for both Trump and Biden. Yes, Biden didn’t do well. The incumbent almost always does bad in their first debate. What I really hope is that Trump and his people get so overconfident after this so-called “win” is that they get absolutely destroyed in the next debate which will be much more consequential.
Whoever thought it would be a good idea to do a debate this soon, and before the conventions should be fired and banned from ever working in politics again. This whole fiasco did absolutely nothing good for anybody, and in the end the viewers were the real losers.
It’s almost as if some people just aren’t great orators or public speakers. Biden hasn’t had many speaking engagements over the past few years where he has to be directly challenged in real-time. He’s been busy trying to run the country. And in any event this wasn’t a debate so much as Trump doing a campaign rally on one side, while Biden is trying to answer questions with some level of intelligence and nuance in good faith in a challenging situation. Not everybody thrives in this scenario. That doesn’t make Biden any less competent.
I have plenty of criticism for Fetterman as a senator, but he knows what he’s talking about here. I remember his debate against Oz and it was an absolutely disastrous performance. Oz also came off as a smug bully and was completely unlikable despite his smooth talk. Fetterman pulled off a decisive victory and I remain hopeful Biden will do the same.
Thanks for the link. I always value her nuanced and thoughtful analysis.
That’s not ideal, but as Monique Pressley put it, “The proof of Biden’s ability to run the country is the fact that he is running it. Successfully. Not a debate performance against a pathological lying sociopath.”
Fucking this. From the moments after the debate where John King was saying how Democrats are in full-blown panic and scrambling to find an alternative candidate my first thought was “give me a fucking break, it wasn’t that bad.”
It’s not clear whether Trump or Biden picked up or lost votes; different polls gave the win to each, and it’s far too early to know how that will shake out over time.
I don’t think this debate will do anything to move the needle on either side. No MAGA Republican will change their vote to Biden after this. No Democrat will change their vote to Trump after this. I don’t believe there’s any true undecided voters at this point. The campaigns have been going on for an exhausting nearly TWO FUCKING YEARS at this point. If you seriously don’t know if you want to vote for a flawed but decent human who’s trying to improve the lives of all Americans versus a convicted felon, fraudster, and adjuticated rapist that that openly wants to turn the country into a fascist dictatorship and offers nothing other than some kind of twisted form of catharsis then I just don’t know what to tell you.
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He’s certainly not displaying “anxiety, agitation, hallucinations, pacing and disorientation” - which are the hallmarks of the “not actually a diagnosis”.
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I wouldn’t offer a diagnosis even if I was qualified to do so, but like I said it adds fuel to the narrative.
Was he really loopy and disoriented? I didn’t see that at all.
What I saw is someone that is very open having a speech disorder, and is decidedly not a good public speaker. He was getting Gish galloped by Trump and was trying to cram a lot of thoughts into a very short window of time and came up short a few times.
I have occasional bouts of stuttering and I know exactly how this feels; my brain is moving at a million miles an hour and I’m trying to make a coherent point but my speaking parts simply betray me and what comes out is completely jumbled and inarticulate. We can’t all get up on a podium and be Abraham Lincoln or Barack Obama.
With that in mind, did Biden stumble over words, yes. Did he make some mistakes? Yes. Did he look confused at times? Maybe. I’d look confused too if I was trying to make a point about some net good I did for the country I did only for the other person to say, “so why are you ripping babies from the womb and allowing billions of millions of terrorists from South America and elsewhere to come from prisons and mental institutions and hand out free fentanyl at luxury hotels after we bought all the best dogs and put them at the border in Afghanistan which was a disaster and America is a hellscape and it’s your fault everything I did was perfect we had the best H2O and everybody in the world agrees with the legal scholars that I aced every cognitive test and lol Hunter Biden.”
I see this as a failing in Biden’s prep strategy. Trump didn’t come to debate or have anything resembling an actual policy discussion. He came to get 90 minutes of free air time to a huge audience to perform a kind of ad-hoc campaign rally where nobody could fact check him. Biden should have simply called out his lies as being lies rather than try to counter every single one with facts and figures. All that did was jumble the message in my opinion.
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This doesn’t seem helpful.
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I’m not sure if I’d use the word “disoriented” but personally the moments that gave me the most pause were when he was answering a question about one subject and appeared like he lost track of what he was talking about halfway through. Not just struggling to find the right words in the moment, which is quite understandable and happens a lot to many of us who don’t even have speech impediments.
One example was when he was answering a question about abortion rights (which he and Democrats generally have public support on) and then inexplicably veered into one of Trump’s unrelated talking points about a woman who was murdered by an immigrant. Sure didn’t feel like an intentional or strategic pivot:
And FYI for those who may want to know more about what was said at the debate but can’t bring themselves to watch or listen to it, the transcript is now available. It’s a cringeworthy read at times, but maybe not quite as bad as the audio version:
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Agreed. I couldn’t watch the whole thing, but from what I did see, the responses I found most successful from Biden were where he just basically laughed at Trump’s rambling, then used most of his time to talk about what his admin would do in a second term.
Wasting time calling out each lie reminds me of that saying about wrestling with a pig.
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There’s always a balance to be played. How much time should Biden spend on his own message.vs refuting Trump’s?
Generally, I think it’s easier to focus on your own message. Refuting bullshit simply takes more time than that debate format allows.
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The gish gallop strategy (if it can be called that) works best with someone, like Biden, who is fact oriented and hates to see bullshit accepted as truth. I know. I have fallen into that trap before. The bullshitter can spew more lies and misinformation in 30 seconds than you can refute in 30 minutes, and by then he’s off on another gallop. The only real way to win is not to play. (I’ve heard that somewhere) Ignore his crapshow and stay on message. Problem is, when someone is butchering truth the way Il Douche does, that is incredibly hard to do.
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