By Mike Huckabee
October 2, 2024
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After watching the Vice Presidential debate, I thought of the famous opening of the TV series, “The Paper Chase,” in which the imperious Professor Kingsfield says to his students, “You come in here with a skull full of mush…and you leave thinking like a lawyer.” It struck me that Tim Walz and J.D. Vance were the perfect illustration of that before-and-after scenario.
You know it was a (pardon the term) bloodbath when even CNN admitted that Vance won the debate. Here’s how CNN’s Scott Jennings put it: "…All I could think of was -- man, Walz is so in over his head. I mean, can you imagine this guy sitting in the White House Situation Room with that facial expression that's like 50% sheer terror and 50% extreme bafflement? I mean, it was amazing the split-screen difference between a competent Vance and a totally in over his head, Walz.”
In fact, the split screen of the two created one of the greatest memes of the election thus far: Walz looking as bumfuzzled as Elmer Fudd while Vance looks sideways into the camera, as if channeling Bugs Bunny and thinking, “What a maroon!” I’m surprised he didn’t hold up a sign with a picture of a screw and a ball on it.
To be fair, Walz did improve about a third of the way through, getting over his initial nervous bumbling and scoring some good points in what was overall a civil, substantive debate. But he had the help of the CBS moderators (obviously biased in their choice of questions, but not as bad as the ABC duo) and the lack of fact-checking (on Walz, at least) allowed him to get away with a number of patently false claims (no, Trump did not lose manufacturing jobs, and border crossings aren’t lower now than under Trump, to name just two.)
Still, during the first half hour or so, he managed to give us two moments that are likely to live in infamy (or hilarity) on the Internet: when he claimed to have become friends with school shooters…
https://www.foxnews.com/media/walz-stuns-internet-vp-debate-gaffe-ive-become-friends-school-shooters
…And when he blundered around, trying to explain his lie about being in China during the Tiananmen Square massacre, saying he got “caught up in the rhetoric” and “misspoke,” before finally admitting, “I’m a knucklehead at times.” No arguments here, Tim.
Human Events editor Jack Posobiec tweeted, “Tim Walz wasn’t at the Tiananmen Square Massacre, but he was definitely at the VP Debate Massacre.”
As for Vance, he did a masterful job, even better than expected for someone who is a Yale-trained litigator. If Walz saw his job as proving that Vance is “weird,” then the mission failed. Vance came across as cool-headed, intelligent, well-spoken, bipartisan and likeable. He deftly parried slanted questions and turned the focus back on the failures of Biden and Harris, pointing out that the “day one” in office she keeps talking about when she’ll implement all her alleged plans was 1400 days ago. He actually did a better job of defending Trump than Trump did in his debate.
When moderator Margaret Brennan broke the rules by trying to do a “fact-check” and “correct” him on the legal status of Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, Vance fact-checked her “fact-check” right back (she seemed to forget which one of them has a Yale Law degree.) CBS finally resorted to cutting off his microphone.
https://www.westernjournal.com/jd-vance-confronts-moderators-repeatedly-break-rules/
VP debates usually don’t move the needle much, but in a close race, Vance might have surprised a lot of voters who only know him as the scary straw man image the media has tried to create. Voters who like Trump’s policies but are concerned about his temperament might be reassured to see what an impressive second-in-command he’s chosen. He also laid strong groundwork for his own presidential run in 2028 or later. He’s young enough to be a force in politics for a long time to come.
Here’s the full debate, in case you missed it…
https://www.youtube.com/live/3XBRmpegweM?si=pB1y4hxxT3bHAksn
Here‘s a round-up of more commentary on the debate:
https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2024/10/01/tim-walz-gets-spanked-in-debate-with-jd-vance-n4932971
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2024/10/02/jd-vance-faces-off-against-tim-walz-n2645556
Here are some honest-to-gosh actual “fact-checks”:
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2024/10/01/fact-check-solar-panel-supply-chain/
And for those who enjoy reliving the debate with their witty conservative friends providing running commentary, here are a few of the live blogs…
Coming up tomorrow: Watching the VP debate with Scott Adams
Trained hypnotist and bestselling author Scott Adams (who also created the DILBERT comic strip and is supporting Trump in this election) decided to do a livestream of the VP debate on Tuesday night and then compare the two performances in detail in his Wednesday podcast. So tomorrow, we’ll summarize and comment on what he had to say, about the debate and the election in general with only a month to go. We understand there’s going to be a whiteboard…
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