VP debate moderators showed their ‘smug and arrogant bias’ – California Globe

Tuesday’s vice presidential debate was disappointing but expected, just because my expectations were already so low. CBS ‘haircuts’ Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan provided one surprise: I didn’t expect them to be so bitchy. Someone said after the debate that O’Donnell and Brennan showed their smug and arrogant bias. I’ll stick with bitchy.

The debate moderators announced the rules at the beginning, which meant the candidates did not have to be fact-checked by moderators — but Brennan or O’Donnell then made comments after Vance’s answers. So it was rich when JD Vance fact-checked them – live on national television – but his microphone went dead.

A few of the questions I wanted asked and answered during Tuesday’s vice presidential debate:

• How are you going to reduce the cost of living?
• What are you going to do about the high interest rates?
• What is your plan to increase housing construction?
• How are you going to close the border?
• What did you do for the response to Hurricane Helene?
• The Longshoremen’s Strike – Would You Negotiate With the Union?

Although the moderators asked about the line, it was up to JD Vance to correct them. They asked about parents of “migrants” (illegal aliens) who were deported and separated from their American children under Donald Trump’s promise of deportation. Vance gave this astonishing answer:

“For three years, Kamala Harris bragged about undoing Donald Trump’s border policies. She did exactly that. We had a record number of illegal crossings. Record numbers of fentanyl came into our country, and now that she’s running for president, she says she has a religion… All she did when she became border czar was undo 94 of Donald Trump’s executive actions to open the southern border. .”

And when Vance addressed the 320,000 children lost to the Department of Homeland Security, as well as the drug mules smuggling drugs across the open border, Walz interrupted and said, “drug mules, aren’t they,” and claimed that the Biden administration/ Harris the “largest decline in opioids in the nation’s history.”

Vance said Kamala Harris “enabled drug cartels that use children as drug mules. She bragged that she would overturn Donald Trump’s border laws.”

I enjoyed JD Vance made Tim Walz think he agreed with him and then issued the correction: “Tim just said something I agree with. We don’t want to blame immigrants for higher housing prices, but we do want to blame Kamala Harris.”

The moderators spent an inordinate amount of time on climate change – a lot of whining with very little tangible meaning. JD Vance set them straight again when asked why he called climate change a “hoax.”

Vance said the real problem in “clean energy” is spending, and the hundreds of bills to finance solar panels and components made in China. Vance said we need more energy production in the US, and that includes nuclear energy.

Vance emphasized several times that the US was energy independent under Trump, and will remain so if elected. And he said bringing solar panel and component production back to the U.S. is a win-win for jobs and because U.S. manufacturing is much cleaner than China or India.

I just think it’s a shame that “childless cat ladies” and “they eat the dogs, they eat the cats” didn’t come up. Vance was ready for that – “He’s concerned about the things I said…” Vance said when Springfield, Ohio came up.

Vance corrected moderators and Walz’s poorly asked questions or incorrect answers, specifically Trump’s tax cuts.

Walz claimed that former President Trump “gave tax cuts to the wealthiest and is now proposing a consumption tax.” (He should have said “tariffs.”) “We just want the wealthiest to pay their fair share,” Walz said.

O’Donnell asked Vance how he would pay for it. Vance said Harris has had three years to implement what she now claims she supports, and asked why she hasn’t done so.

“Donald Trump’s economic plan — he has a record,” Vance said. “The resources went to the middle class,” and he talked about the boom in the American economy when Trump was president – ​​low interest rates, record low unemployment, record low inflation, and an abundance of energy and independence.

Walz tried to hang the Covid pandemic around Trump’s neck, claiming his Covid response “led to a collapse of the economy.”

Vance denied this and asked why anyone would trust “experts” who shipped American jobs to other countries. He noted that Trump brought manufacturing jobs back to America.

He also questioned why drugs and medicines that Americans need and use are “made by countries that hate us.”

Walz completely missed the opportunity to correct the record on his decades-long claims that he had been in Hong Kong on June 4, 1989 – the day of the Tiananmen Square massacre. He refused to say it wasn’t true, claiming instead that he was an idiot and occasionally “mistalked.”

“Tim Walz may not have been in Tiananmen Square, but tonight he was hit by a tank,” wrote Daniel Greenfield on X.

Moderators asked about abortion in the 9th month. Walz told stories of women who died while seeking “reproductive care” in other states. He spoke incessantly about how Minnesota has addressed abortion. He then claimed that Trump would pass Project 2025, which will “eliminate fertility treatments.” And claimed Vance supported a national ban.

Vance said he had read Minnesota’s abortion law, and that “physicians are not required to provide life-saving care for failed abortions.” Walz denied this.

“Tim Walz did, however, repeal the law that protected babies born alive after botched abortions,” wrote Megyn Kelly on X, adding this news article.

Moderators focused their sites on JD Vance and the “gun violence epidemic,” accusing Vance of “opposing most gun laws.”

Vance said he is in favor of securing schools and hiring school staff and security guards.

Towards the end of the debate, Walz got into some nasty comments against Vance about Donald Trump’s request to investigate the 2020 election results.

“To deny what happened on January 6, the first time in American history that a president or anyone else tried to overturn a fair election and the peaceful transition of power. And here we are, four years later, in the same boat,” Walz said.

Walz asked Vance, “Did Trump lose the 2020 election?”

“Tim, I’m focused on the future,” Vance said. “It’s a damn non-answer,” Walz said.

Once again it was three against one in this debate. Still, JD Vance gave an excellent debate performance, answering the biased questions and turning the story around when necessary. Walz sometimes came across as an affable idiot, or like a pit bull on the attack. The contrast was telling.

It’s all political performance art for the left.