The morning after the vice presidential debate between current Veep Mike Pence and Sen. Kamala Harris, the lingering impression is of a patronizing and condescending Pence regularly talking over and ignoring the two accomplished women in the room. Pence repeatedly ignored questions, talked around them, and demanded that Harris not answer the questions given by the moderator, USA Today's Susan Page, but his questions. If the Trump/Biden team was hoping to make any inroads with the as-yet undecided "suburban housewives," Pence blew that all to hell.
He was a more bottled-up Donald Trump, but still Trump, steamrolling the debate in a flurry of lies. He delivered them much more smoothly than Trump could, but the same blatant lies, exaggerations, and bullshit were on full display. (I mean, it drew flies.) Pence was so full of it, even The New York Times didn't bother to both-sides in their fact-check. Pence, they wrote, "deployed a number of misleading or inaccurate arguments" on the Trump administration's coronavirus response," "exaggerated or mischaracterized the Obama administration’s record in dealing with smaller scale pandemics," and "employed false, misleading or exaggerated statements in debating abortion, climate change and the administration's record in fighting the Islamic State." Harris, in turn, "overstated some of her arguments."
The Times and The Washington Post in its fact-check do a better-than-normal job of going through the litany of, in the Post's words, "flimsy claims out of the Trump playbook, although he often delivered them more deftly," from Pence. The Times counts 16 instances in which Pence exaggerated, lied, or misled, and the Post counts 13. That's compared to the Times count of three misleading statements from Harris, one of which is dubious. They said that her claim that "On Day 1, Joe Biden will repeal" Trump's tax bill is false because the House and Senate have to pass legislation to do that. If the Democrats hold the Senate starting on Jan. 3, it's not impossible to think that by Jan. 20, they could have that bill. Is it a stretch? Yeah. A lie? Not yet. The Post highlighted all of two statements from Harris that were questionable.
But it was the massive elephant in the room—health care and the coronavirus—that got short shrift and a flurry of lies from Pence. What was particularly remarkable was Pence standing (well, sitting) before the nation and stating that the Trump administration's response has been the "greatest national mobilization since World War II." He actually said, with more than 210,000 Americans dead from the virus and nearing on 8 million infected, "I think the American people know that this is a president who has put the health of America first and the American people, I believe with my heart, can be proud of the sacrifices they have made. It’s saved countless American lives."
He sat there and said "President Trump and I have plans to improve health care and to protect, protect pre-existing conditions for every American," ignoring the fact brought up by Harris that Trump is right now arguing before the Supreme Court that those protections in the Affordable Care Act are unconstitutional. And the fact they do not have a plan, after four years of Trump saying there would be plan any day now.
The entire nation right now is watching as a sick Trump is on a steroid-fueled rampage, still denying the gravity of the pandemic, still flouting the basic safety precautions to keep the people around him healthy. They're seeing a White House floored by the pandemic after a superspreader event at the White House to introduce the would-be Supreme Court justice who would do Trump's bidding at the court. Who would be a vote to take health care away. Pence painted an entire alternate reality, the one in which Trump lives. He was Trump, just a lot paler and able to speak in complete sentences.
No comments:
Post a Comment