Well that was a lot better than last weeks debates. Both candidates did darn good performances.
Well that was a lot better than last weeks debates. Both candidates did darn good performances.
I enjoyed last week's debate more, regardless of whether they stayed on topic or not. I found tonight's debate nauseating.
I thought Biden did great. I thought Palin did well, but not quite as well.
I can't believe Palin told Gwen Ifill that she is not going to answer the questions, but "speak to America blah blah blah". I didn't realize it was 'cater to Sarah Palin night'. As a voter, there were a few issues that I wanted to hear her answer, but she ended repeating some off topic rant. Biden was for the most part precise and appeared to know the facts.
Am I the only one that would vote for a Biden/McCain ticket?
Hocrest wrote: Am I the only one that would vote for a Biden/McCain ticket?
In that order? I probably would.
I like Biden more than the other three.
Salanis wrote:Hocrest wrote: Am I the only one that would vote for a Biden/McCain ticket?In that order? I probably would. I like Biden more than the other three.
Yeah, Biden - Pres and McCain - VP
I have to admit, I know little about him other than what I saw last night...
It was better than I expected, although a few times I was cringing when Palin was talking. All in all, both did quite well.
Well enough that I seriously doubt that either candidate moved any of the polls significantly. Perhaps moved a few non-commitalls to each side, but I would not be surprised if it was even to both.
The only "schocking" revalation was when Palin sort of kinda admitted to giving same sex couples the same rights as hetro, but she "made" that up by saying gay marriage was not good by any means....
BTW, was anyone else troubled by the counter claims by Palin that 1) government is bad (brought up in the healthcare issue) but 2) they will regulate Wall St. and fight corruption. Uh. If you can't do one, you can't really do the other too, since they are both government regulations. People working FOR the government toward a specific goal. There were a few times this came up outside of that.
Still, it was a decent, but unmoving, debate.
Eric
" Well, Golly Gee.." Palin sure came off folksy
And Biden looked like the snake oil salesman, he is.
Almost make me want to vote .... McC...
( slapped back to reality )
Write in Ron Paul
None of the other four deserve to get near the White House
I think the vice presidential debate went swimmingly.
The big worry I had was that Biden would get in there and his notorious tendency to make gaffes would screw up everything, but no, he held his composure and spoke relatively to the point.
Sarah Palin on the other hand ignored questions constantly and kept replying with "Well hold on, I want to go back to X issue!". Well tough, Sarah, it's a debate, stick with the program.
Sure, I've known who I was going to vote for since ages ago, but it's still amusing to watch the debates :P
Oh, and what's with Sarah Palin bringing up Biden's wife? Biiiig no-no.
Again, are you guys talking about the old guy with the fake smile selling time shares in Alaska with some bimbo on the TV last night? I guess I should have watched but after 30 minutes I needed a shower, sweet and slimy.
blech.
I switched to the debate during commercial breaks in Smallville and SuperNatural (I think there might be a joke in there about how did I know when I was watching the debate and when I was tuned to SuperNatural?), anyway, I managed to catch nearly every point mentioned here. Biden looked calm and composed (I didn't get to hear him respond to any questions) but what's with Palin and her "do overs"?
And, yeah, McCain and Palin need to be reminded that if government regulation is bad for healthcare, it's also bad for anything else. So make up your minds M/P are you for or against it?
I'll echo what others said here, with the disclosure that I'm leaning toward McCain at the moment.
Palin came off as overly sweet/folksy and Biden looked like a living political stereotype. Like the soccer mom that's inexplicably always in a GREAT mood going up against the slimy old used car salesman...it was just creepy at times.
The contrast was what stood out to me more than anything else. As for their policy discussions, they both agreed on the overly obvious points and had some good points of contention. Looks like they both studied voting records. I realized, though, that about halfway through that Palin has a bit of an advantage: she can attack the voting records of both Obama and Biden, whereas Biden pretty much just had to go for McCain.
It was also clear that his entire intention for the night was to say the word "McCain" and the word "Bush" as close to each other as possible and as often as possible.
Either way, it's an interesting race. I'm much more involved than I was with Bush/Kerry, and I feel like we have two very good tickets to choose from. At the very least, that's encouraging.
too funny not to post a Fargo reference.. hehehehe
speedblind wrote: The contrast was what stood out to me more than anything else. As for their policy discussions, they both agreed on the overly obvious points and had some good points of contention. Looks like they both studied voting records. I realized, though, that about halfway through that Palin has a bit of an advantage: she can attack the voting records of both Obama and Biden, whereas Biden pretty much just had to go for McCain.
That's why the parties field governors so often. They haven't done anything that can be firmly attacked. It's better to have not done anything wrong than it is to have done something right. If a candidate gets put on the defensive, they have effectively lost.
This is especially true when one candidate is a Senator. Senators have long voting records on lots of issues. Doesn't matter if 90% of what they have done is something people loved. All their opponent has to do is pull out that other 10%, and make them defend their past actions.
Not going to be quite the same this time around, since both Pres candidates are senators.
"...she can attack both the voting records of both Obama and Biden."
While that may have been a PLUS in ln last night's debate, the fact that Palin has almost no record is a MINUS in my mind. I didn't watch all of the Katie Couric interview, just small bits, and I find it errily reminescent of "W" that Palin can't name a newspaper that she reads. Or is it just that she's afraid to name a 'paper as it may label her?
While Palin came off as a rube and had enough gaffes, Biden outright lied numerous times and no one will take him to task for it.
"But John McCain will not support a windfall profits tax. They've made $600 billion since 2001, and John McCain wants to give them, all by itself — separate, no additional bill, all by itself — another $4 billion tax cut."
The $4 billion tax cuts for oil companies was something Biden brought up like 8 times. This is a "questionable" attack, because McCain wants to give -all- corporations a tax cut, there's no preference for oil companies which is highly implied the way Biden's framing it. But in this paragraph, IMHO he goes way over the line by calling it "all by itself" and "separate". That's no longer framing the statement in a BS way and hoping the audience draws the implied, erroneous conclusion from it. No, sorry, there he took the framing to the point of a blatant lie.
Calling McCain out repeatedly for not signing on to a bad bill (that Biden was all for, BTW) with time-tables and then claiming that it was non-support for troops was ludicrous.
His "Article I lays out the VP's executive responsibilities" was a serious gaffe that he of course won't get called on, at all. The VP has always been President of the Senate. The idea that Cheney "invented" the VP's role in the legislature, that it is a "bizarre notion", is jaw-droppingly dishonest or incredibly ignorant.
Oh, and btw, when Biden spoke with passion and flaming outrage about how McCain refused to meet with the leader of Spain... another massive lie. All McCain did was refuse to commit to a meeting in one interview... that's not remotely the same thing as the sort of outright refusal to meet at all that Biden got so outraged about.
"The last point I'll make, John McCain said as recently as a couple of weeks ago he wouldn't even sit down with the government of Spain, a NATO ally that has troops in Afghanistan with us now. I find that incredible."
That's just an outright lie. McCain never said any such thing. There's no semantic way to make that true. Maybe if he'd said "McCain wouldnt say when asked that he would meet with the government of Spain", then you'd have a point, but that's not what he said.
At the debate last night, Biden argued that (a) that we had "kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon" and (b) he and Obama had suggested sending NATO troops to Lebanon to "fill the vacuum":
Biden at Last Night’s Debate:
"When we kicked — along with France, we kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon, I said and Barack said, "Move NATO forces in there. Fill the vacuum, because if you don't know — if you don't, Hezbollah will control it." Now what's happened? Hezbollah is a legitimate part of the government in the country immediately to the north of Israel."
My question, or rather, questions: Is he on drugs? Exactly when did this kicking occur? Has anyone alerted Sheikh Nasrallah?
And the NATO claim is just a riot. Obviously, there was no vacuum to fill since Hezbollah has only grown in strength in Lebanon since 1983, but has anyone seen something, anything, to support the claim that Biden or Obama wanted NATO in Lebanon — a proposal that would have been wildly controversial and would have made ballistic the hard Left voters they were then bending over backwards to attract?
On the off chance Biden simply misspoke and was actually talking about kicking Syria out of Lebanon, (a) we didn't do that either — they've never stopped operating there, (b) Hezbollah was part of the Lebanese government well before demands for a Syrian pull-out began in 2005, (c) Biden's "fill the vacuum" whopper still makes no sense because Hezbollah retained military control of southern Lebanon regardless of Syria, and (d) again, where is the proof that Biden or Obama wanted NATO to replace Syria — which would have pitted it against Hezbollah and invited a reprise of the 1983 Marine barracks bombing?
Biden, during the Democrat primary, about Obama's statement concerning meeting with Ahmadinejad without preconditions:
'Afterward, other candidates echoed Clinton’s criticism. Sen. Joseph Biden, who has emerged as the clear-eyed antiwar realist in the Democratic race, told National Review Online that the idea of a president meeting with Ahmadinejad, Chavez, and others was “naïve.” “World leaders should not meet with other world leaders unless they know what the agenda is, so you don’t end up being used,” Biden said."
Obama’s website:
"Diplomacy: Obama supports tough, direct presidential diplomacy with Iran without preconditions…"
Biden at last night’s Vice-Presidential candidates' debate:
"Can I clarify this? This is simply not true about Barack Obama. He did not say sit down with Ahmadinejad."
And yet, here's video of Obama stating he -would- personally meet with Iran and other enemy nations without preconditions during the Democrat primary debates. How many times have they denied this now, and claimed it's a vicious Rethuglican smear?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3Oj7Jn9rv4
And as an aquaintance says,
"If you had any doubts as to whether Joe Biden really goes to Home Depot (snort)... let's just say the Delaware restaurant he claimed he'd just been to was on a different street than the one he claimed, and closed its doors 25 years ago.
I can't wait till he regales us with stories about the high prices at Nobody Beats The Wiz last week."
Chris_V wrote: bunch of stuff
but nobpdy beats the wiz... NOBODY!
Ya know, Seinfeld had a lot of shows that were stupid...but there was always at least one jewel of a line in every episode, and "....nobody beats the Wiz" is one of them.
E36 M3, my take home test for poly-sci is to watch it (on youtube, i worked thursday night) and pull two one page papers out my ass on it. Fun, fun fun...
http://www.nbc.com/Saturday_Night_Live/video/clips/vp-debate-open-palin-biden/727421/
in case you didn't see it...
ignorant wrote: http://www.nbc.com/Saturday_Night_Live/video/clips/vp-debate-open-palin-biden/727421/ in case you didn't see it...
THAT was Awesome. With a capital A. 
Thanks for the link!
ignorant wrote: http://www.nbc.com/Saturday_Night_Live/video/clips/vp-debate-open-palin-biden/727421/ in case you didn't see it...
Jesus CHRIST. I can't get over how eerily perfect that impression is. Possibly one of the best impressions of a politician ever. Just brilliant.
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