Biden vs. Ryan: Debate Analysis

I only watched a brief recap (shown below) but I feel like I got the gist of this debate.

VP Debateness by ZeFrank (A Show)

So the buzz is that Biden was a big, fat meanie and not worthy of his office and poor, little, beleaguered, doe-eyed Paul Ryan could barely fluster out his ideas in the face of that mighty onslaught. That’s what I heard from others who neither watched the debate nor have access to anything other than the mainstream American media.

For example, the Washington Post was typically rabidly right-wing in the their assessment. In the post David Brooks Wants to Mix It Up by Kevin Baker (Harper's), Baker talks about a discussion he had on a television segment a day or two after the Ryan/Biden debate.

“[R]ight-wing Washington Post blogger […] Jennifer Rubin […] sniffed that Joe Biden’s toothy feistiness had been “unworthy of his office”—a continuation of a charge she had made on her blog that the vice president is the sort of person her neighbor hates to sit next to at church dinners.”

A pretty typical cognitive dissonance: when your guy (Romney) does it, it’s a sign of his feistiness and desire to win the presidency and lead America to a new dawn; when the other guy does it, he’s being rude and a bit, fat meanie. It seems Ryan should be granted a win just for having been brave enough not to take his ball and go home.

Baker related more of this woman’s fascinating worldview,

“What’s more, Rubin wrote, the fact that “lefty bloggers and pundits ate up Biden’s antics is a telling commentary on how vitriolic the left in general has become.” […] It’s all part of “an unhinged liberal universe” that constantly calls Governor Romney a liar and launches “vicious attacks on his business record […]””

Calling a politician a liar is an observation, not an opinion. And, in this regard, Romney certainly strives to lead the way. It’s Fascinating that good ‘ol Joe Smith[1] thought to ban coffee and booze but not brazen lying.

The article Why we vote for liars by Jack Shafer (Reuters) has an interesting discussion of America’s predilection for liars.

“The pervasiveness of campaign lies tells us something we’d rather not acknowledge, at least not publicly: On many issues, voters prefer lies to the truth. That’s because the truth about the economy, the future of Social Security and Medicare, immigration, the war in Afghanistan, taxes, the budget, the deficit, and the national debt is too dismal to contemplate. As long as voters cast their votes for candidates who make them feel better, candidates will continue to lie. And to win.”

While on the subject of brazen lying, Paul Ryan was also at the top of his game. Like his running mate, he didn’t shy away from dragging out dozens of his party’s standard talking points—many of them utterly divorced from reality. The post Paul Ryan Told 24 Myths In 40 Minutes by Igor Volsky (Alternet) sums up several, like:

“Medicare and Social Security are going bankrupt. These are indisputable facts […] When they [Iran] see us putting – when they see us putting daylight between ourselves and our allies in Israel, that gives them encouragement.”

In the face of such utterly bush-league conspiracy-theory bullshit, what other reaction could one have than barking laughter and utter disbelief? Well, there’s the standard press reaction, which is to simply reiterate it without doing any tiresome fact-checking, but no one’s accused the American media of being serious in a very long time. The post The Vice Presidential Debate: Joe Biden Was Right to Laugh by Matt Taibbi (Rolling Stone) expands on this theme, noting that,

“The Romney/Ryan ticket decided, with incredible cynicism, that that [sic] they were going to promise this massive tax break, not explain how to pay for it, and then just hang on until election day, knowing that most of the political press would let it skate, or at least not take a dump all over it when explaining it to the public. Unchallenged, and treated in print and on the air as though it were the same thing as a real plan, a 20 percent tax cut sounds pretty good to most Americans.”

“Most Americans” would be the same benighted folk who know almost nothing about their own politics and country so, although cynical, Romney/Ryan have made a pretty safe bet. A populace bred to forsake the long—or even medium—term in favor of the extreme short-term will no doubt be delighted to elect a team promising an utterly magical 20% tax cut. Tabbi again: “The proper way to report such a tactic is to bring to your coverage exactly the feeling that Biden brought to the debate last night: contempt and amazement. (Emphasis added.)”

Contempt isn’t even enough. Republicans with half a brain in their heads should be insulted that these two—and the Republican party, in general—think so little of their potential voters that they don’t even make the effort to peddle anything other than utter nonsense and fairy tales. Taibbi again, “we should take patriotic offense that anyone is trying to seize the White House using such transparently childish and dishonest tactics. […] So much of the Romney/Ryan plan is so absurdly junior league, it’s so far off-Broadway, it’s practically in New Jersey.”

It would be one thing to be fooled by a good flim-flam man and his cunning partner, but this is ridiculous. It’s downright embarrassing, is what it is. It’s “not intellectually serious”. But it just might work in a country that couldn’t care less about intellect, a country that crowns moronic lap-dogs like George Will as its intellectual elite. The strange part is, since they’ve already tipped reality out the window, why not go whole-hog and just promise the sheep the world? Or, as Taibbi put it:

“If you’re going to offer an across-the-board 20 percent tax cut without explaining how it’s getting paid for, hell, why stop there? Why not just offer everyone over 18 a 1965 Mustang? Why not promise every child a Zagnut and an Xbox, or compatible mates for every lonely single person?”

On the other hand, a 1965 Mustang for every household sounds more ridiculous, but an across-the-board 20% tax cut is so utterly fantastical that it beggars belief. And yet, it seems to be working its magic on the woefully undereducated hoi polloi.

The posts Biden v. Ryan: The Old Pro Takes On the Lying Kid by Adele M. Stan (AlterNet) and 10 Best Biden Put-Downs of Paul Ryan in Veep Debate by Adele M. Stan (AlterNet) are quite partisan, but they cite longer sections of the debate transcript, from which it can be determined that Ryan really shot himself in the foot that night. This is most likely because he’s spent such a long time in the right-wing echo chamber—where no one ever calls “bullshit” on even the most hare-brained ideas. For example, he addressed the debt and deficit, the full blame for which Ryan (as expected) cheerfully laid at the feet of the Obama administration.

From the article:

“At that, Biden literally threw up his hands in a grand gesture, saying: “[T]hey talk about this Great Recession if it fell out of the sky, like, ‘Oh, my goodness, where did it come from?’ It came from this man voting to put two wars on a credit card, to at the same time put a prescription drug benefit on the credit card, a trillion-dollar tax cut for the very wealthy. I was there. I voted against them. I said, no, we can’t afford that.””

Up until the last few short sentences, Biden was doing well. He’s right to point out that the roots of the deficit and debt lie far deeper than just four years back—a fact that’s as plain as the nose on your face, but that seems to have gone missing from the standard story, a version in which the two Bush administrations simply never existed. The Obama’s-to-blame-for-every-penny-of-it version of the story is just as likely to be believed and much more politically expedient. Where Biden turns to lies himself is in saying that he voted against all of these things, which he most certainly did not.

Still, at least Biden addressed the elephant in the room: namely, the attitude toward 47% of Americans considered to be moochers and loafers who should consider themselves blessed to be allowed to live in America with such shining examples of strapping humanity as Ryan and Romney. Whatever you can say about Obama—and he’s a prevaricating bastard as well—at least he doesn’t smack his constituents in the face with Objectivist fantasies about his inherent superiority.

“With regard to Romney’s “47 percent” remarks, Biden insisted that Romney meant what he said, despite his recent walk-back of those comments as “wrong.”

““[I]f you heard that that little soliloquy on 47 percent and you think he just made a mistake,” Biden said, “then… I think I got a bridge to sell you.”

Well put, Joe. But quit while you’re ahead.

When Ryan tried to attack the Obama administration for its stimulus spending—a practice well-known to be absolutely verboten under the rules of his patron saint Ayn Rand—Biden was there for him, “citing two letters sent by Ryan to the Department of Energy, requesting a share of stimulus dollars for companies in his district in Wisconsin.”

Biden went on,

““And I love my friend here,” Biden said, with a flash of teeth. “I’m not allowed to show [those] letters, but go on our Web site – he sent me two letters saying: ‘By the way, can you send me some stimulus money for companies here in the state of Wisconsin?’ We sent millions of dollars…

““I love that,” Biden went on. “I love that. [According to him, t]his was such a bad program and he writes me a letter saying – writes the Department of Energy a letter saying: ‘The reason we need this stimulus, it will create growth and jobs.’ His words. And now he’s sitting here looking at me.””

Biden doesn’t really have the right to crow about the amazing efficacy of the stimulus program, but that doesn’t enter into it. It’s about the facts and Ryan’s been running—and gaining popularity among constituents—on his opposition to the stimulus. And yet, he begged for a piece of it for his district, justifying it with the same line of reasoning he usually disparages. Utterly morally and intellectually bankrupt—and this the guy who’s touted as the wonky, brainy, self-described “numbers guy”. You do yourself a disservice by accepting him as your intellectual superior.

Another example comes from the article The Creaming of Paul Ryan by Justin Raimondo (Antiwar.com), describing the discussion during the debate about Iran and its supposed nuclear-weapons ambitions:

“Biden performed a real public service as he patiently explained that the mere possession of “fissile material” does not equal having a bomb: although he felt obligated to include the Israelis when describing the official assessment of how far along the Iranians are in the process, the reality is that our own intelligence community has consistently said the Iranians gave up their nuclear weapons program in 2003, and they have yet to revise that opinion (in spite of lots of pressure to do so).

“Ryan’s answer to this was “they are spinning the centrifuges faster” — a nonsensical statement that means nothing. At which point one began to wonder: is this really the man Republicans want to put one heartbeat away from the presidency?”

Again in this case, Ryan comes off as even crazier and more woefully misinformed about Iran, Israel and the Middle East than even Joe I-love-Israel-more-than-anything Biden. No small feat, that. They also discussed the sanctions, trying to one-up one another on who could make the people of Iran suffer more for it’s government’s purported crimes. Biden had the advantage—in American eyes—in that he’s part of an administration that can brag about real, actual suffering that it has caused to innocent people in Iran whereas Ryan had to be happy with countering that he would have made them suffer even more. Truly heartwarming sentiments all around.

So, you have to be careful to separate what Biden’s saying from who’s saying it. It’s about time someone called bullshit on Ryan to his face on national television instead of letting him just slide, as the media usually do. It has nothing to do with the messenger and everything to do with facts. Because if we continue to allow ourselves to get the facts wrong or if we continue to let ourselves be sold a pipe dream instead of real solutions to real problems, we’re only going to get into deeper trouble.

Speaking of deeper trouble, neither of them saw fit to talk about climate-change so, just to be fair, they’re both ignoring the biggest danger facing the country, and the world.