Sotto Voce: The Vice Presidential Debate

This should probably be titled "yelling at the television," not "muttering under my breath."

Joe Biden was who we thought he was.

Was Joe Biden an a**? Absolutely. But, there were times he really took it to Paul Ryan, especially during the segment on Social Security.

Everyone's focusing on Biden's smirks, interruptions, and giggles, but those were only a portion of his presentation. In fact, the debate featured four distinct Joe emotional modes:

PHASE 1: The Happy Warrior: the first 30 minutes saw Biden laughing, smirking, interjecting, and guffawing. These moments coincided, funnily enough, with the moments when Ryan was laying into the Dems on Libya, taxes, the economy, etc. Biden wouldn't let Ryan have a moment to speak because Ryan's words were dangerous.

PHASE 2: The Angry White Male: at some point, Joe shifted (I think during the Social Security segment) and became visibly angry, yelling at Ryan and at the moderator. His anger reached a crescendo during the Afghanistan discussion when Biden accused Republicans of wanting to start another war. (Paul Ryan: "No, we want to prevent war!" Me: "And not lose the wars that we were winning when you took office")

PHASE 3: The Invisible Man: for a short time, Joe seemed to disappear, although it could be that he simply started acting like a regular person.

PHASE 4: The Penitent: during the segment on abortion and the Catholic Church, Joe suddenly spoke with a hushed voice, refusing to even look at the camera. It was almost as if he were looking at his shoes. I don't buy this business that he is personally pro-life but doesn't want to impose his religious beliefs on the rest of us (wow, thanks). Sorry, but Joe has been an abortion warrior through too many Supreme Court confirmation hearings.

Paul Ryan is well known as a budget/numbers wonk, but he was suprisingly effective on the questions of Iran and Afghanistan. Kinda makes you think that having the right answers in foreign affairs is less a matter of knowledge and more a matter of knowing where our interests lie.

Ryan's pro-life statement towards the end of the debate also excellent. Superb, in fact. Pro-life Republicans with perfect voting records are a dime a dozen, but few have spoken as effectively as Ryan did last night.

In fact, I need to stop for a moment and crank the PA system up to 11: HEY! TODD AKIN! CAN YOU HEAR ME? I'M YELLING BECAUSE I WANT TO MAKE SURE YOU CAN HEAR ME OUT THERE IN MISSOURI! The next time someone on teevee asks you about abortion, or life issues, do what Paul Ryan did: keep the focus on the innocent unborn, completely helpless and fragile, rather focus on bobbing and weaving to avoid answering the sort of questions that every Republican who seeks higher office will face.

It's no surprise that Biden would lie throughout the debate, but it was annoying how the moderator was willing to let so many obvious falsehoods go by.

There was his claim that he had voted against "both wars" that Paul Ryan voted to put "on the credit card." Really, Joe? You voted against the Authorization for Use of Military Force in Afghanistan? As it happened no one in the Senate voted against AUMF, althought there were two abstentions.* Joe Biden was not one of them.

There was the more plausible, but still false claim that he voted against the Iraq War. Yeah, there were some leftist Senators who voted against that, but not "middle class" politicians from Deleware trying to appeal to some mythical voting bloc in Scranton.

There was his side of the mouth comment that he's always coming to these VP debates and hearing Republican Vice Presidential candidates talk about death panels. Ryan, of course, never said "death panels." Neither did Sarah Palin. She coined the term in 2009 during the Obamacare debate.

Either the moderator is not as plugged in or politically aware as she thinks she is, or she was simply unwilling to call Biden out on this patent BS.

Joe Biden's performance reminded me of WH Auden's line about how the Thirties were a low dishonest decade.   If his schtick works, and sometimes it does, we are in big trouble.

* (Jesse Helms and Larry Craig, if you must know).

Romney-Ryan:

It's Romney-Ryan carrying the Republican banner for 2012. Conservative grassroots types had been pushing Ryan, so no one can really complain that we got RINO-ed to death.  Prof. Jacobson raises the obvious problem with the Ryan pick:

The Romney Veep App made the announcement earlier this morning, and every news source is reporting it. The decision was made on August 1. 

The left already is going crazy, but that would have happened regardless of who the Veep nominee was; only the details of the outrage would have differed.   

This was a bold choice, far more bold than I expected. My first reaction when I heard the news was one of deep ambivalence, drawn naturally from knowing how the Obama campaign and media would distort Ryan and his budget proposals.

That's true, but hardly unexpected. Dems only know one way to deal with anyone who dares to suggest progressive governance may be insolvent. Just look what they did to Ross Perot. Man got so crazy he thought Republicans would disrupt his daughter's wedding, as if we gave two sh*ts. I do hope that Romney-Ryan (Rom-yan? Or, better yet, R-yan?) aren't planning to leave any scrap of lefty hysteria unanswered for more more than a second because the media is poised to write the first draft of history wherein it is noted that Paul Ryan was too anti-Grandma to be VP.

btw, I did not sign up for the Romney VP App. No, I get my news the old fashioned way: via my Facebook feed, which was going nuts when I woke up this morning, followed by a confirmatory glance at Drudge and Instapundit.

Sunday Quick Links

It's one of those days when I can't pick just one thing to write about, but don't have time to write about everything: 


If you were wondering how Michelle Obama's "secret" trip to Target (did she ever go to Target pre-2008? Does Chicago even have a Target within the city limits?) was memorialized on film, well it's because the White House tipped off the AP. Pretty pathetic. 


Chris Christie is the man of the hour. Some say that he is the only (GOP) man for the times: a tough talker who can appeal to Reagan Democrats, and face down the public employee unions. Could be, but unions are only a sliver of the left coalition, and Christie has a lot of political sympathy for virtually every other element of the Democrat base. Among other things, he is as dumb on the environment as Joe Biden (or any other green). We can do better. 


Paul Ryan reviews Jeffrey Sachs's new book, describing it as having "veneer of economic analysis cannot conceal what is essentially a crusade against the free enterprise ethic of our republic." Nice to see at least one GOP politician try to take on the intellectual heavies on the left. 


This guy wants to believe that the present Wall Street protests are "like Egypt." The protesters are more than just the usual hippies, communists, and nose-ringed college students, says he. There are unions and "grannies" there! Very middle class! (pictures at the link). Right, well any union presence is going to be bused-in astro-turf. As for the "grannies," I think we're all hip to the truth, which is that old leftists like to grasp the mantle of respectable seniors, knowing the media will treat them as cuddly old folks, rather than as socialists who hate their country. Anyway, these protests not "like" Egypt; they are like Greece. 


On the other hand, the apparently unprovoked pepper spraying of a couple protesters by a normally desk-bound "cop" is just the sort of thing the blame-America-first crowd loves. You'd think every police officer in NYC would be hip the way leftists use this sort of thing for their own propaganda. San Francisco cops sure do. But, as JFK used to say, there's always one dumb son of a bitch who never gets the word. 


The al-Awlaki drone strike was a just result. He may have been "American-born," in the words of media style-books, but he left the US as a small child and was not acting in America's best interests. Obama's been getting this 100% right, but his ambivalence has been undermining his strategy. 


An inside view of the intimidation of the health insurance industry during the passage of Obamacare. For all the talk of the "right wing noise machine," if a GOP president and his allies had tried something this heavy-handed, there would have been all sorts of "brave" dissidents rushing to the microphones. But, let Democrats do it, and everyone's all STFU. Has to be because they were worried about unflattering stories published by the White House's media allies - meaning the media - right?


Herman Cain's rise is due entirely to his being the only optimistic candidate. People clearly want to hear his message, yet Cain is held to be "unelectable." OK, assuming he's unelectable, that doesn't mean the "electable" candidates can't learn something from him and his methods.


Btw, I thought Cain (or Santorum) would "shock the world" by running strong in Iowa, but it seems Cain's moment is now, and not four months from now. That means the media will be "vetting" him. In other words, they'll be seeking damning quotes from every disgruntled employee, disappointed corporate rival, and bitter stripper ex-girlfriend (I kid, I kid) that they can find. These are never our republic's finest hours. In fact, they are some of our worst as the elites among us broadcast rumors and innuendos as if they were dispatches from the Somme. Hope Cain is ready for it. I also hope he is ready to fight back in the manner of Clarence Thomas, rather than flinch away in the manner of virtually every other GOP politico unfortunate to have gone through this process. 


Michael Wilbon asks a damn good question about a new Walter Payton biography:  "what is the exact purpose of writing a book, 12 years after Payton's depressing death at 45, that goes to agonizing lengths to tell us essentially that Payton was flawed?" Supposedly, it's because Payton's public persona was that of a solid citizen when in private he cheated on his wife and used, get this, pain killers. It's that darn hypocrisy, again! Really, a professional athlete who sleeps with women not his wife? That's news? What about a look at Mrs. Payton. Maybe she was a pain in the a**? And since when was pain killer use a scandal? What's really galling is knowing that journalists who love to flog this sort of information probably couldn't stand up to a similar level of scrutiny.