I’m glad I wasn’t the ONLY person watching Vance ‘dance’ in NOT acknowledging most of the questions in his debate against Tim Walz about the Trump crazy assed shit that he has turned to since Kamala Harris took over for Joe Biden’s dropping from the race….
Vance got some good reviews for being more polished than Walz, but what the friendly assessments were praising was a breathtaking exercise in sane-washing a slew of unpopular right-wing positions. Why did Trump run away from the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 policy wish list, which was prepared by many in his orbit? For the same reason that Vance hedged so much on Tuesday: Hiding the ball is now central to the right’s political strategy.
That tactic rests not only on evasion but also on distraction. And Vance was revealing on this, too. The one issue on which Vance tightly hugged Trump’s playbook was immigration. They’d be happy if it stayed at the front of voters’ minds for the next five weeks.
It’s why they kept the hideous stories about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, alive long after they were revealed to be lies. It’s why Vance came back to the subject again and again Tuesday night, no matter what question the debate moderators posed….
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Where a pugilistic Walz came to life was at the end of the debate. No matter how much Vance wanted to sanitize his image and Trump’s, there was one issue on which he could not break with his patron. Vance has said that unlike former vice president Mike Pence, he would not have accepted duly elected members of the electoral college in states where Trump disputed the results with absolutely no evidence.
Walz observed that Pence’s insistence on obeying the Constitution was why Pence was not standing next to him. “I would just ask,” Walz said, referring to Trump, “did he lose the 2020 election?”
“Tim, I’m focused on the future,” Vance replied.
“That is a damning non-answer,” Walz fired back.
It was not only Walz’s best moment; it also undercut a lot of the work Vance had done to put a kind and gentle face on a reactionary, antidemocratic political movement and its leader.
The impact of the Vance-Walz encounter on the election will be hard to judge, but its effect on the nation’s political understanding should be enduring. Vance had to hide the impact of his ticket’s policies behind a wall of benevolent grandiloquence and invent a Donald Trump who doesn’t actually exist. It’s not the approach of a candidate confident in the righteousness of his cause….
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Pollster Nate Silver suggested Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) was “sanewashing” his Republican rival, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), in Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate.
“The term ‘sanewashing’ is going around among liberal media critics, the idea that the media is too willing to normalize [former President] Trump and Vance’s behavior,” Silver said in a Substack post Wednesday. “Wasn’t Walz sanewashing Vance? He said nothing about the Republican ticket’s conspiratorial claims about Haitian immigrants eating pets, for instance.”….
image…The Economist
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