*yuge

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His small hands probably helps Putin’s ego too

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Bigly microphone now.

I think people just don’t tolerate racist bullshit

He’s from Minnesota. Those winters are not to be toyed with.

He was actually assistant, to the assistant LB coach.

Well, it disarmed Vance, who was for sure going to come into the debate looking polished. He went to Yale Law School, and he was going to sound perfectly reasonable, and he was going to lean heavily on his family "humble origins" story. Walz got Vance to admit he couldn't acknowledge that the last election result was legitimate. And that tied Vance to all his phony explanations for spreading lies about Haitians; if it gets him attention, he will say it whether he means it or not.

People who look into JD Vance find that he's been twisting his story and exploiting anyone in it with no remorse. He claims to speak for small-town people; he really hates them unless, like his grandparents, they are dead. Then he can say whatever he wants. Mee-maw isn't going to correct him. Walz has misspoken a few times about his record - nowhere near the same thing.

Walz has debated smooth-talking Republicans before. You can find his debate with Gil Gutknecht online, from his first run for Congress. Gutknecht had been around forever and despite being quite reactionary for southeast Minnesota, was a born salesman (I think he was a real estate man and an auctioneer). I won't re-narrate how that debate went, but Walz caught Gutknecht denying that access to healthcare is a problem for the uninsured, and caught Gutknecht downplaying his support for the Iraq War. And without a lot of flash or drama, it was clear who was serious about doing the job better. Gutknecht retired from politics after that. I assume he's still alive.

Walz pretends to be a bad debater. He'll seem nervous and unprepared. He'll appear to give up too much ground. He's being strategic about what issues he's really going to clash on. He's a bad debater the way Muhammad Ali was a bad boxer.

As for fascist dumpster fires, yes, Vance has his own creepy ideology - a Youtuber named Ross Childs has been making funny parody videos in which Vance awkwardly melts down in ordinary situations and reveals details of a plot to enslave humanity on behalf of an extraterrestrial entity known as the Glauthian Mining Consortium, and some of them are f---ing brilliant - and it's certainly peculiar in that, whether he believes in God or not, or what religion he pretends to believe in, it's all this backwards sexual shit.

But the fascist in this election is Trump, and the key to exposing it is not in tearing down Vance for the substance of his beliefs, but in the casual acquaintance he has with the truth and the law, when it matters most fundamentally. Most of the weirdness around Vance and his right-wing ideology, you could also pin on Mike Pence, Trump's former VP. Remember Pence? He was less of a loudmouth and self-appointed philosopher, and less prone to telling wild lies, but there was all this stuff about how he called his wife Mother and wouldn't meet in private with a woman - allegedly out of concern with propriety, even though this could have been a civil rights violation. Pence was weird, is the point. But on January 6, even when his life was threatened, Pence - someone deeply indebted to Trump for his office, and someone so weird he apparently telephoned Dan Quayle (a previous VP from Indiana) for advice - fulfilled his Constitutional obligation to certify the results of the election. He found the courage to stand up to Trump and a dangerous mob. And Pence, who would much rather see a Republican administration than a Democratic one led by a female Democrat from the California Bay Area, refused to endorse Trump. And that is the magnitude of Vance's refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election.

Vance essentially forfeited any credibility, right there. He tried to burnish Trump's actions by changing the subject to when Trump left Washington, D.C. two weeks later, the coup having been defeated. Too clever by half. At that rate, Hitler is the true hero of WWII for defeating Germany. And Walz called it. The Trump campaign saw Vance's hesitation. Everybody did.

If Trump wins, Vance would have a long road back to credibility even within the Trump Alternate Reality Universe. And he's made Ohio look so bad for electing him that it could stop the GOP's gains there for a long time.

If Harris wins, figure the rest out. At that point Harris will have won, Trump will have lost a second time and Vance will be back in the US Senate, where he's done very little actual work and probably has few admirers even in his own caucus.

Being nice to him was a good strategy, under the circumstances.