The last debate -- 2012

To the extent victory can be declared in these things, Obama clearly won the debate last night. He was fully present, well versed on policy and well prepared to parry every cheap shot Romney could possibly take at him. Mr. Romnesia, despite his best efforts to fake peace lovin' Mitt, who just happens to have hired nearly every one of the Bush era neo-con foreign advisors, was reduced to a puddle of flop sweat by the end.

(And where, I ask, was that famous handkerchief when he really needed it?)

Willard Romnesia very nearly duplicated McCain's awkward lolling tongue exit from the stage.

Of course, nothing will dislodge the "both sides" narrative of a corporate media desperate to maintain the ratings only a "tight" race can deliver. To be fair, old Bob did better at moderating than I expected. (Granted it was a very low bar). But he spoils what little respect one might have when he delivers this nonsensical assessment of the debate:

Debate moderator Bob Schieffer said Tuesday he was "surprised" that President Obama and Mitt Romney sought to shift the final debate on foreign policy issues toward domestic policy concerns.

Maybe we watched two different events. I'm pretty sure if you read the transcript or watch the video, you'll find that it was Romney who derailed the discussion from foreign policy to his favorite domestic talking points which have been well covered already. If it can be said Obama "did it too" it was because he was responding to Romney's false slurs. If old Bob had been a bit better at his job, he would have insisted the Mittster answer the actual questions instead of changing the subject altogether.

Slate at least noticed Romney's deflection tactics but they still missed the mark with the "both did it" elide. What do they think Obama was supposed to do under the circumstances? When you have your opponent on the run, you have to follow them in order to keep fighting. You don't deploy onto an empty field.

Obama demonstrated his competency, his cool and his experience. Mitt went to a foreign policy debate and did everything possible to deflect the questions and change the subject. That is when he wasn't explicitly agreeing with and endorsing President Obama's current policy. Willard's entire argument was: "I'd do the exact same thing as the President, only it would better because I'm so awesome, everyone will love me and fear me."

Willard's biggest problem is not "everyone" agrees with his grandiose self-assessment:

A BBC World Service opinion poll has found sharply higher overseas approval ratings for US President Barack Obama than Republican challenger Mitt Romney. — An average of 50% favoured Mr Obama, with 9% for Mr Romney, in the survey of 21,797 people in 21 countries.

This is important but sadly, a much too large percentage of Americans either don't understand how critical international consensus is to our national security or they're too hooked on self-destructive chest thumping nationalism to care. [Photos via LGF and knck1es.]

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The Romneys are such lovely people

At the debate, Mitt Romney blamed parents for the violent tendencies in their children. Then his son Tag Romney, said he wanted to punch out President Obama. Of course, he was just joking (*wink*). I mean, does this look a family prone to anger?

[photo via]

And her Ladyship Ann Romney, was just scratching an itch here -- honest.

Gosh, their Lord and Master, Willard Mitt Romney, he never gets mad.

[photo via]

Not ever. He the epitome of even-tempered.

[photo via]

Nah. The one you have to worry about is that angry blah guy.

[photo via]

Yeah, the blah guy is the big meanie who so rudely contradicts the word of the Mormon's prodigal son.

To paraphrase a Balloon Juice tag, I can't believe we might lose to these people.

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Mitt's many binders of women

[graphic via]

By now you're aware the seminal moment of the debate was Mitt's bizarre response to a question about equal pay for women. And of course, binders of women became an instant meme. Within minutes, there was a facebook page with 142K likes, a tumblr page and the phrase was trending on the twitter. But the hiliarity shouldn't obscure the larger issues.

To the shock of no one, Mitt lied in his personal anecdote about how he was so very concerned that no women had applied for a job with his cabinet after he was elected governor that he immediately sent forth his menfolk to scour the land and assemble said binders of women. In fact, MassGAP, a bipartisan group had approached all the candidates before the election and asked them to commit to hiring more women. Mitt agreed to sign on, (why not, he'll do anything for a vote) and the group did vet and assemble a list of candidates. In other words, the group did all the work and Mitt took credit for it last night.

To be fair Mitt did hire “roughly two or three” of the suggested MassGAP candidates. (No, I don't know what "roughly" is supposed to mean either.) But the part about Mitt not having any candidates of his own, was another Romney lie. He hired "around" ten women total. The others were off his own list.

And why was Mendacious Mitt so interested in hiring women in the first place, when the Mormon tradition suggests a woman's place in the home and she shouldn't pursue a career once she has a family. Well, I think Matt Bors may have the answer:

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The great debate 2012

Well I'm feeling like absolute hell today so I'm late in my take on last night's debate. There's a lot to unpack on the content but in general, as clearly illustrated by the photo, by any reasonable metric President Obama won this round decisively. He was fully engaged and challenged Mitt's fabrications repeatedly. He struck the perfect balance between respect for the process and disdain for Romney's rude behavior and wild blathering. Romney came off as rude, arrogant, floundering and angry.

Unsurprisingly, Romney's supporters and whining pundits were complaining about Candy Crowley today. I thought she was stellar myself. Not that familiar with her work but I haven't been impressed with what little I did know of her journalism. I had low expectations going in but she turned out to be the best moderator I've seen in many years. She keep them both pretty much within the time limits and didn't allow Mitt to bully her. And of course her on-air fact check will become the stuff of legends.

Also had little hope for the town hall format. While there are surely a few exceptions, for the most part alleged undecided voters at this point translate to attention seekers in my experience. That may still be true but I found the questions to be much more relevant and interesting than any I've seen asked in recent memory.

So overall, I expected to be bored and disgusted. Instead I was almost enthralled. In fact, I was surprised when I noticed it was close to the end. And almost sorry it was over. As for the specific issues raised, that's a whole other post. Probably more than one. [photo via TPM]

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]

The debate

Guess I'm going to watch for a while anyway. Not sure how long I'll last since I'm still feeling pretty yucky. But for now, I'll be tweeting random thoughts so you can see that on the sidebar widget. Otherwise, I'll recap in the morning.

When Irish eyes are smiling

The VP debate last night was being billed as the "Thrill in the Ville." It lived up to its billing for me. I didn't want it to end. I got the feeling neither did Joe Biden. He was clearly enjoying his freedom to Hulk smash Paul Ryan's pathetic lies as they popped up. Felt like watching the kids play whack-a-mole at the arcade. And Joe Biden won all the prize tickets.

This of course, dismayed fully half of the on-air punditry. Much pearl clutching and gasping for air on the fainting couches about the heinous incivility of derisive laughter. It totally ruined their pre-written script for Old Joe the Gaffer versus the Whiz Kid of the GOP. Their whimpering was largely drowned out by the rousing cheers of newly heartened liberals in my seating section. Indeed, the collective sigh of relief from the left blew the roof off their newly constructed house of dark despair and let in the light again.

As might be expected, Charlie Pierce has the best telling of the Fall of the Mighty Paul Ryan:

On Thursday night, Biden dragged out the old Paul Ryan — and, I would argue, the real Paul Ryan — and put him on display, and he made the new Paul Ryan own him. ...

The ideas [Ryan] could explain were bad enough, but the profound ignorance he displayed on Thursday night on a number of important questions, including when and where the United States might wind up going to war next, and his blithe dismissal of any demand that he be specific about where he and his running mate are planning to take the country generally, was so positively terrifying that it calls into question Romney's judgment for putting this unqualified greenhorn on the ticket at all. Joe Biden laughed at him? Of course, he did. The only other option was to hand him a participation ribbon and take him to Burger King for lunch.

The GOP's whiz kid ended up looking like all kid, no whiz. I was reminded of those movie scenes where the wise, vaguely amused older guy is holding a little enraged kid at arm's distance, while the kid wildly flails at the air.

Unclear how much any of this will matter generally, but if it did nothing else but restore joy and some semblance of serenity on my social nets -- that's good enough. [Getty photo via Holly Bailey tumblr]

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Reality Show

By Capt. Fogg

Oh who cares whether Ryan or Biden "won" this TV spectacle? Vice presidents don't count, unless you think about Cheney, and although Romney is a sock puppet with the strong arm of  the radical authoritarians making his lips move, I don't see him being led around by Ryan as another Darth Cheney.  Who cares anyway? It's not as though the public has become smarter or has learned from experience.  These things are only a game and never, ever does a President resemble in office what he tried to resemble on camera and the platform they sell at the convention is rarely more than a facade.  There's a difference between dealing with the world as it is and dealing with the tableaux, the passion plays, the street theater, the Potemkin Village we take for reality.

So CNN says his supporters think Ryan expressed himself better.  I don't know. I have better things to do with my time, but assuming he did, does anyone think that getting the angry rabble to cheer is the indicator of suitability to administrate a Democracy -- even a pretend Democracy like ours?  Obama's haters were quick to syllogize at us in 2008 that he gave good speeches and Hitler gave good speeches, and therefore Obama is another Hitler. Who cares what such people think?

So the Romney/Ryan thing gives rousing speeches, albeit captious and dishonest ones. So the real truth is not quite as rousing, easily summed up to the satisfaction of one's enemies, or blamed on 'Libtards.'  Who gives a shit?

I had a conversation with someone last night.  An engineer, a very nice guy, a very devout Baptist and fellow Radio Amateur about the peculiar state of the ionosphere.  We're supposed to be near a sunspot peak and yet HF propagation is generally poor, without the Summer openings on 10 and 6 meters we've waited years for. I joked about writing my congressman. He quipped about killing all the lawyers because, as he said, "they'll only blame it on Global Warming and George Bush." He wasn't smiling.

So easily is scientific consensus and massive data dismissed and so easily the destruction of the US economy according to the 30 year experiment with trickle down, debt-doesn't-matter and wars-pay-for-themselves-when-we-cut-taxes agenda as given us by the Republicans. Truth doesn't matter, so how can these 'debates' mean anything?

Really -- why should I listen to these things?  I already know who has built a three ring circus around  the argumentum ad captandum argument, learned to enrage the public with lies and profit from the rage they ignited. No, I'm not going to tell you that Romney will exterminate minorities or that Ryan is a Nazi who wants to put Grandma in a camp, but the people who pull their strings have perfected the same rhetoric, the technique and the ability to harness tribal enmity, bigotry, superstition and self-pity.  They know how to make you passionately believe things that are self-contradictory, follow policies that always and dramatically fail and they know how to get their way. So sure, Romney won and Ryan won and whether or not they're elected, George W. Bush and Global Warming have sealed our fate, or at least made it unlikely that anything will ever be the same. 

Deep sigh

Few see this as a problem.

Josh Marshall on the twitter: Whole Lotta Polls: 113 polls entered into @PollTracker database before 1pm today.

As the cool kids say these days, I just can't...

VP debate day so there's little news and lots of speculating. No surprise that the only pre-debate prediction worth reading is Charlie Pierce. Not going to spoil it with any excerpts at all, but this is my favorite line in the post:

Conservatism's mansion has many rooms, and almost all of them are padded.

POTUS is out campaigning. This is media pick for quote of the day:

Barack Obama on Romney just now :”After a year of running as severely conservative now he’s trying to convince you he was severely kidding.”

Admit I rather like it myself.

And this is the best explanation of the $716 billion Medicare cut lie I've seen yet. Worth a read if you're in the business of debunking right wing mythology. Also pretty good graphic found on Facebook.

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But what has it got in its pocketses, eh?

You all know how much I love a good conspiracy theory and Romney's cheat sheet is a great one. The campaign swears it was a handkerchief Mitt threw on the podium at the first debate. But it surely is a little weird that it bounced that hard when it hit the wood. And what did Romney try to put in his breast pocket after the debate was over? It does seem odd that it wouldn't fit.

Of course, it's not something that can ever be proven. Much like the mysterious lump in George W's jacket back in 04, we'll never know for sure. But it's certainly not beyond the pale to believe Romney is capable of cheating. It's practically mandatory for Republicans. It's probably in their rule book.

So credit where it's due for the meticulous breakdown of the video. They made a damn good case for Romney slipping in a cheat sheet at this debate. Besides, how the hell else would he be able to remember all those gazillions of zingers everyone said he was practicing for all those weeks?

The answer isn't always Occam's razor

I've been checking the reaction to the debate all day. Really diverse and interesting mix but my pal Lance Mannion had the best take:

Mitt won last night by being a liar, a bully, and an all-around jerk. That should be the story.

Of course, this was not the media story, nor was it a general consensus. Everyone has their own preferred narrative. But read Lance's whole post. Everything I've seen on the internets today suggests he's spot on.

This didn't play as well on the street as our very influential punderati thinks it did. Mitt's all new style may have played very well with the angry white men, but women across the spectrum were reminded of abusive former boyfriends.

That and in perhaps the most inconsequential, yet most damaging moment, Romney told America he wants to fire Big Bird. Which of course, immediately spawned several Sesame Street memes, twitter accounts and hashtags. Like sad Big Bird:

Angry Muppets:

And my favorite instant twitter account, FireMeElmo.

Mitt also cheerfully told the moderator, elderly Jim Lehrer, that he's going to have to fire him too. The smirk on Mitt's face when he said it, negated the "fact checkers" who insist it isn't fair to say Mitt likes to fire people. Romney clearly relished delivering that line last night. People noticed.

Mock me if you must but I'm sticking with the rope-a-dope theory. Mitt told at least 27 shameless lies last night, providing a treasure trove of oppo material. Which has already begun to be made into ads:



Hard to believe Obama didn't anticipate Mitt would lie. There's still over a month of campaigning and two more debates to go. This is far from over. It's a complex game with intricate rules. I have to believe Obama learned something about how to play it in four years.

So why not let Mitt "win" the first round to see what he's got? Raise expectations for the second debate. Hammer him with his own words from the first one in between. Jack up the pressure on Willard the new Republican Wunderkind. It's not that complicated a theory. Not seeing why it's so implausible.

Addendum: Oh look. I'm not alone. And funny. I was thinking Mitt might as well have been twirling his Simon LeGree mustache...

It's okay if you're not a Dixie Chick

I'm so old I remember when a white Republican was occupying the White House, it was a capital crime to "disrepect" the office of the President with even the mildest criticism. Funny how that rule changed the minute a Democrat took over. Now it's aok to say any old ugly, stupid thing about our POTUS:

Former New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu, a Romney campaign surrogate, said that President Obama's debate performance showed him to be "lazy and detached" in an appearance on MSNBC Thursday.

But why stop there?

One more thing: Sununu, not content to insult every American who believes that the Presidency deserves minimal respect, added this gem on Fox News. Asked if Obama would do better next round, he replied “When you’re not that bright, you can’t get better prepared.”

Loosely translated into 27%er raw meat, dog whistle spew that would read, "What more can you expect from a shiftless n*gger?" Which is pretty damn choice coming from the gelatinous Sununu who couldn't pry his fat ass off government airplanes until he got caught taking well over a half million dollars worth of free rides on the taxpayer's dime.

Sununu is an unrepentant crook and completely corrupt politician, yet Romney embraces him as a valued surrogate and the media puts him on the TV as a credible authority. He's one of many exactly like him. And people still wonder why this country is going to hell?

Debate round one: The rope-a-dope strategy

Judging from the mass meltdown in my twitter stream, clearly a disappointing night for liberals. I seem to recall the same wailing and rending of garments from the left at this point in 08. They wanted Obama to draw blood and he didn't. Hell, he barely put up a fight. But I also remember when this meme was invented in response to the same sort of doom-saying.

Debate is three round fight. Rope-a-dope strategy dictates you hold back and deliver the knock out punch at the end. Good to remember that media over-built expectations for Obama. Now expectations are raised for Mitt. Which raises the pressure on Mitt to deliver the same performance again. Mitt cracks under pressure. Also, this will make Mitt over-confident. Think about his European tour. Mitt went into that over-confident too. How did that work out for him?

If Obama clobbered Mitt out of the gate, the media narrative would have been angry "blah" man and Mitt would looked much more human and sympathetic. It felt to me Obama was deliberately holding back to raise expectations for Mitt and to calm down Mitt's big money donors. Which is another big picture strategy. Congressional races are just as important, if not more so. Initial post-debate reports tell me all those big pocket donors that were about to bail on Mitt and put all their money into Congressional races are now back on board with Mitt. To the extent that we keep those resources split, it's to our benefit.

Also, conservatives get really obnoxious when they think they're winning. It brings out the worst in them which will remind those few persuadable voters outside the hard core 27% why they don't want to be associated with them. And don't forget, Mitt was supposed to come across as more personable. He failed on that score. He came across as arrogant and aggressive and he lied his twitching face off. He was supposed to dish up some specifics about his mystery plan to save America. The only thing he was clear about is his intention to kill Big Bird. I'll be interested to see how that plays out in the few days.

A month is long time in politics. No one will remember the first debate by the time next two are over. POTUS always moves to his own timetable. Just because he doesn't instantly respond to the demands of the internets doesn't mean he doesn't have a plan.Obama played out plenty of rope last night. As the old maxim goes, give a man enough of it...

Think I'll wait a little longer to freak out.

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]