I do not have much time to comment as I’ve got a novel, a novella, a short story, and a novella worth of RPG material that need to be done by the end of the year, but I’ve got to comment on the VP Debate.
Overall, the polls are interesting and match what I’ve heard from people. If you were watching on TV, you thought Biden looked like a rude, weird, jackass. If you were listening on the radio you thought it was about even. If you just read the transcripts then you think Ryan lost.
Which is interesting, and it is sort of like what happened to Kennedy/Nixon.
If you didn’t watch it, Biden’s mannerisms were just plain odd. I could see what his strategy was, just laugh, and grin, and act like every single thing Ryan said was the craziest thing you’ve ever heard. That was probably how Axelrod coached him. (typical liberal tactic there, if you can’t respond with facts, just dismiss your opponent because they are stupid/racist/lying/ugly/a bad novelist/defense contractor, but you get the idea).
Problem was, in typical Biden fashion, Joe went way overboard into creepy, drunk uncle you avoid at family gatherings territory. Biden interupted Ryan 82 times in 90 minutes, so keeping in mind that Ryan is only talking about half of that, Biden was interupting Ryan a couple times a minute. That has never actually happened before in any American presidential level debate since they’ve been televised. Strategically I can see this appealing to the democrat base after Obama’s dismal wuss performance last week, but he just looked like a bully to everybody in the middle, and for the folks on my side, well, Joe is Joe, so nothing really surprises us with him.
Now, as to the actual topics of debate. Ryan managed to stay on message and looked coherent and sober. Biden laughed during parts that even if that was Axelrod’s strategy, he really shouldn’t have laughed through. “We’ve got four dead Americans–” BWA HA HA HA! “Nuclear war is a real possib–” HAR HAR snicker SNORT!
I live Tweeted during the debate, so let me pull those up and expound on my thoughts at the time:
Joe Biden just said that Iran is far from getting a nuke and they aren’t really a threat… Wow.
So Joe Biden, you are saying Iran is totally incapable of 1940s level machining to make a nuke?
To elaborate, getting the materials is the hard, time consuming part. Building the actual device to detonate them is the easy part. So Joe admitted that Iran has the fissile materials to make five bombs, yet we’re not worried, because they haven’t built the actual bomb…
Okay, remember the Manhattan Project? The hard part was making the stuff that could go boom. Making it actually go boom was still a challenge, but it was an engineering challenge, and the only reason it was so hard for us at the time was because nobody had ever done it before.
I’ve got some friends who work in the Really Big Freaking Bomb business. Basically, to build the most simple type of nuke, if provided with the materials, and working off of the designs that have been out there since the 40s, a modern machine shop could easily do it. Machining technology has gotten so much better since then that it is ridiculous. But don’t worry, because I’m sure nobody in Iran has a CNC machine. According to these guys, the actual construction could be done rather easily, and extremely quickly.
But keep in mind, this was the same section where Biden says that the Whitehouse totally didn’t know the facts about Libya, and reported that it was all the fault of a stupid Youtube video, including saying that before the UN general assembly, (even though Matt Drudge and everybody with an internet connection knew what had happened within 24 hours). So the same Whitehouse that wasn’t informed on what actually happened in Libya, wasn’t informed that the ambassador had asked for more security 200 times, and never heard from their DoJ about Fast & Furious, will like totally know the second somebody in Iran turns on a CNC machine… Gotcha.
Biden keeps on grinning and looking smug. Ryan looks serious. Biden is still doing better than Obama.
Pretty much.
So the democrats came out as wimps in the first one, and then overcompensated and went full bully in the second. If Obama could find a happy middle, he might do fine in the next one.
Holy crap, Chuckles, chill out on the sex offender grin. I wouldn’t buy a used car from Joe Biden.
By this point Joe had gone full on into crazy, leering, weirding out mode. Because yes America, should anything happen to Barack Obama, this is the man that will be representing us… Sleep well.
I’m an accountant. Everything Joe Biden just said about taxes and business just made blood shoot from my eyes.
If you couldn’t hear any of Biden’s answers during the tax/budget portion, that was because every single CPA in America was standing up and screaming at their televisions. It was frankly nuts. Social Security is fine. Medicare is fine. Everything is fine. The jobs numbers aren’t rigged! Look how awesome we are doing! The stock market is doing great, unless you want to allow younger people to put their personal SS in the stock market, then the stock market is stupid and lame! We inherited the worst mess EVAR! Democrat congress? I do not know what these words mean! We’re doing awesome, so awesome in fact that we don’t need to pass budgets for four years! Budgets are for chumps.
Wow… Just wow.
You know what? Here is a list of 670 economists from universites all over the country that agree with me and think Obama’s fiscal polices are lame, including 5 Nobel Prize winners, for economics, not the lame ass Peace Prize which has been given to Yassir Arafat (for not killing anyone lately), Al Gore (for making a fortune scamming people about the weather), Barack Obama (for getting elected and stuff), and now Europe (for being a continent).
http://economistsforromney.com/ (and two of my former professors are on the list. Go Aggies!)
Oh, and by the way, the fact checkers, even the liberal ones all had to admit that the numbers Ryan threw out actually did come from the Obama admin’s own actuaries.
There was a bit here where I think Ryan could have answered better (if he hadn’t gotten interupted literally seven times in one minute). Yes. Ryan, as a representative of Wisconsin, asked for federal funds from a federal program. People in Wisconsin send money to Washington. Washington then screws with it, makes up crap, and sends some of the money back. It is a congressman’s JOB to get that money back for his people. That is their tax dollars. You can fight a program and think a program is stupid, but once the program is in place, and they are funding it with YOUR money, you are an idiot to not try and get some of it back.
How about this? Instead of taking money from people against their will, running it through the hyper efficient federal government, then forcing them to scramble and fight to get some of it back, we just let people keep more of their money in the first place? CRAZY TALK, I know.
Did Joe Biden just slip up and say that we have “training” in Syria? Did he just admit to SF boots on the ground?
Not that this administration doesn’t leak like a sieve or anything anyway, but I thought that blunder was particularly interesting. For those of you not familiar with how it works, if there is a country with a war going on, and there are Americans there “training” that means Special Forces A Teams. I’ve got a lot of friends from this community. I’m sure they appreciate getting sold out like that.
On a related note, it turns out that I know some of the men that have been stationed in Libya. The guy testifying before Congress this week, Lt. Colonel Wood is a good man. He replaced a friend of mine as battalion commander of our local SF unit, (Edit, I just realized I skipped a commander in between) and I know a lot of the guys that worked for him, and went to war under his command. I never met any of his men that didn’t respect Lt. Colonel Wood, and if you want to know how good an officer is, just listen to what the guys that work for him have to say about his character. So if Wood is saying that they asked for help, they knew they were in danger, they knew there were imminent threats, there’d been other attacks againt diplomats, and they could even name them, but State told them to pound sand, you can take that to the bank.
But that’s okay, because the President totally didn’t know… It was all the fault of this YouTube video…
This moderator has surprised me with her badassitude.
To clarify, I do think she was biased toward the democrats, and she let Biden run wild. (but to be fair, who can possibly restrain the majesty of a wild Biden in its natural habitat?) However, she did ask very difficult questions, and did not let anyone off the hook. So overall, all things considered, much better than I expected.
Biden: “Let me make this absolutely clear… I am a shitty Catholic”.
This was from the abortion portion. Basically, Biden said he’s a staunch Catholic and believes Catholic doctrine, and life begins at conception, but he’s pro abortion because he doesn’t want to force his beliefs on anyone…
Let’s think about this for a moment. You’re saying that you personally believe that a fetus is a person, but killing them is okay, because you don’t want to be pushy… No. That would be condoning murder for political expediency.
Let me clarify further. Let’s take religion out of the question entirely for a moment. You don’t need to be religious to have a moral code. Quite the contrary. I know many atheists that have strong moral codes, and across the board they can agree that murdering human beings is usually a bad thing. The question for these people then becomes one of, when does a person become a person?
So, Biden said that he believes a fetus is a person but it is fine to kill them…
How is that possibly okay?
The modern abortion debate is simply early 1900s eugenics tied up with a pretty bow labeled “woman’s rights.” Eugencis are all about rating humanity on an arbitrary scale of usefullness, and then manipulating it accordingly.
The fetus is a person because if you leave it alone and let it do its thing it is going to be born and assume legal personhood by every possible definiton. But then you get the whole liberal argument of babies are a parasite! (actually, no, they do not meet the scientific definition of parastie, but let’s run with this anyway for a minute). Basically this is a eugenics based argument, that since a fetus is not self sustaining, then it is okay to kill it. (I even had one person say that a fetus was only “scientifically alive” the same way fire was alive! Uh… sure, except for that whole cell division and ability to pass on DNA parts, but whatever lets you sleep at night)
By the logical extension of the parasite argument, then we should be able to kill babies up until the age of about two or three because they aren’t self sustaining either, and without someone to care for them they will die. This same argument has been used by every totalitarian that has ever committed mass murder, just the sliding scale of what defines acceptable humanity changes.
Hell, using their own argument, since many liberals are parasites and unable to sustain themselves without aid their entire lives… But there I go again with my whole right wing hatemongery. See, sliding scale of morality. It’s awesome.
So where Biden’s defenders are saying “look how tolerant he is!” I see a man who is a coward who sold out his own moral convictions to play politics.
Also during this portion, Ryan clearly articulated a fairly standard republican position, in that abortions should be allowable in the case of rape, incest, and if the mother’s life is in danger. You will note that 2 of those 3 are the sorts of things that would normally be done right away, and the element of personal choice and accountability was stolen from the individual. Despite all of the crap about the War on Women, which is basically a media fever dream, the majority of republicans aren’t a bunch of Sharia Law fanatics.
Depending on which statistics you use, rape, incest, and danger to the mother abortions make up between 1-4% of the total of all abortions. So 96-99% of abortions are basically retroactive birth control, where you kill somebody because they are inconvenient.
When a wise man has a controversy with a foolish man, the foolish man either rages or laughs and there is no rest.” – Proverbs 29:9
That was actually a retweet from Adam Baldwin, but pretty much nails the vibe of the whole debate.
