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Tonight’s debate — 43 Comments

  1. Unfortunately, it started about the way I expected, rehashing the virus; and I am out. He is forced to debate the moderator, and after he finishes she gets in another little shot. Between the two the whole debate will be defending himself.

  2. I think Joe dug himself quite a few holes tonight and I thought Trump did a very good job persuading him to dig deeper.

    Chris Wallace now re-capping that Joe Biden very skillfully handled the subject of Hunter Biden’s emails, quickly throwing Trump on the defensive. ( ?? ) Press is still ‘all in’ on Joe, but they’re starting to suspect the light at the end of the tunnel is actually the train coming.

    One last thing, I did note that the moderator seemed to give Joe the last word much more than Trump. Anytime Trump had a rebuke, she went back to Joe.

  3. Aggie. when did you notice the moderator?
    I noticed in about five minutes, and it drove me from the room to check Instapundit’s drunkblog.
    Maybe if I had something to drink myself, I could have lasted longer. Actually, to be honest, I had to leave the debate, once again, because my wife really gets upset at my language. I used to control it pretty well, but when you reach 85, why not let it all out?

    If Chris Wallace is defending Joe’s performance I am encouraged. He is rightin one respect. It was obvious from the beginning that once again the strategy was to double team Trump and try to keep him on the defensive. From the contemporaneous comments it appears that Trump did score a few fast break points.

  4. The moderator did as well as a Commission approved moderator could, and to her credit, she did at least ask Biden about the Hunter fiasco. Weirdly, the Courts weren’t even brought up as a topic.

    I’m not saying she was perfect, but she was better by a mile than Wallace.

    Trump, thankfully, was better by a mile than his own previous incarnation as a rabid pitbull in the first debate. He let Joe ramble instead of interrupting him every two seconds, and when he did interrupt, it was focused and brief.

    I thought Trump did great on the “race issue,” as he defended his record and continually forced Biden to address the Crime Bill. This culminated in an admission by Biden that the Bill was a mistake, and he’s long wanted to replace it. Whereupon Trump kept asking: “Why haven’t you, then? Eight years wasn’t enough?” “A Republican congress,” Biden said. And then Trump very slyly replied, “Well, you gotta talk to them, Joe. Like I did on prison reform.”

    He also got Joe to say that he would “transition away from oil,” which may have seemed like a bigger admission to me than it did to others. Biden was teetering on coming off as an environmental extremist by the end.

    Trump made an ill-advised remark about “low IQ” illegal aliens returning to court after being caught and released. He tried to hammer Joe on the Hunter stuff, but he wisely didn’t push too hard. He made his point, and there was nothing more he could do. He also had a great line about the Biden family being “like vacuums, sucking up money everywhere.”

    Biden didn’t do anything terrible. He stammered and stuttered a lot, but mostly stuck to his script. He seemed angrier than Trump, too. He was loud and emphatic and table-pounding and finger-pointing. Not sure if that’s a good or a bad thing. Trump actually came off as calmer, at least to me.

    I can never tell what the narrative around these things will end up being, but Trump definitely did not lose tonight. At the very worst it was a wash. In my opinion, it was the best debate performance Trump has ever given (low bar, I know).

    Overall, I thought Trump came off a bit worse than Biden in the first debate, and better in this one.

  5. My reaction pretty much mirrors Kolnai’s. I thought Trump did well, and the moderator was better than I expected. I surprised myself by lasting through the whole thing.

  6. I second Kolani’s analysis. The moderator definitely slanted questions but did allow debate. Also she did not go to white supremacy route. That alone gave her a better grade. She did not debate Trump like Savanah Guthrie and Chris Wallace did. Trump acquitted him self well especially on race. He hit Biden over and over about him being all talk. I wish he would have kept an earlier phrase “I have done more in 47 months than you have done in 47 years.” That tag line is memorable and easy to relate to.

    Grade:
    Trump A- due to the health care bugaboo that he is saddled with because the Republicans still don’t have a plan.
    Biden C+ – stayed on his feet and can lie with aplomb. His most effective tag line is “I will be president for all Americans”
    Moderator B+ – stayed out of the debate but gave very slanted questions.

  7. It was a better performance from POTUS. He let Joe tell his fibs and then refuted them. Trying to pin Joe down on a policy is like trying to pin Jello to the wall, though. He keeps shifting and lying about it.

    Trump’s best issue, that he kept hammering, was the question to Joe, “You had eight years to do that. Why didn’t you get it done?”

    Joe is scary. He’s obviously too far gone to really be in charge, but he will do the bidding of the lefties. The perfect figurehead that is controlled by much more sinister forces. – AOC+3, and accomplices.

    It will be interesting to see if the Hunter e-mails and Tony Bobulinski’s coming testimony is going to shake things up. Can the MSM keep on ignoring this elephant in the room after tonight?

    I actually enjoyed this one. Yeah, I’m a bit of a masochist. 🙂

  8. The moderator could NOT let Trump answer without interjecting with some kind of correction, deflection from the point Trump was making…and while she asked Biden tough questions, she also helped him out every time he sounded like he was floundering.

    More broadly, the questions directed at Trump were often of the hostile-premise variety: “So, why DO Republicans kidnap kids at the border and stick them in cages?”

    But the worst problem is the gaslighting. There are some people who actually are going to walk away from this thinking that Joe Biden didn’t use Hunter as the middleman to sell access to China, Ukraine, and others. They’re going to think that Biden hasn’t been out-and-ought caught red-handed being corrupt. They’re going to think nobody ever did lose their insurance because of the regulatory changes brought about by Obamacare. They’re going to think blue states are better off and safer from COVID than red states. They’re going to believe all kinds of utterly-wrong horses***t that Biden claimed, because NOBODY’S GOING TO FACT-CHECK HIM, and HE KNOWS IT.

    I swear, if another GOP president or presidential candidate allows the Swampwater-Sodden “Commission on Presidential Debates” to choose the moderators ever again, I’m going to build my own nuclear arsenal and nuke myself just to end the misery. It’s like having a Cold War era Olympic figure-skating finals judged by nothing but East German judges.

    Yes, this chick was moderately better than Chris Wallace. But moderately better isn’t good enough. I’m sick of the GOP nominee always having to debate two opponents at once. I want to actually see a debate that doesn’t make me scream at my computer about how Democrats always get softballs and Republicans always get “when did you stop hitting your wife?”

    I want, for a change, Biden asked how far back he became involved in Hunter’s sale-of-influence, and Trump asked how he managed to get so many Nobel Prize nominations in such a short period of time.

    See? Writing those two questions took me less than ten seconds; why is it I’ve never heard a hardball/softball pairing like that one? Why’s it always the other way around?

  9. Biden is and was horrible, but this debate won’t change a single vote, and it doesn’t even matter that tens of millions of people have already voted.

    The election is and always has been a referendum on President Trump, and if there’s low enthusiasm for Biden, there is rabid enthusiasm for voting against the president.

    But it’s also a referendum on four years of the Democrats and the left trying to overthrow the 2016 election, and if there’s wild enthusiasm for Trump, there is also off-the-charts enthusiasm for voting against Pelosi, Schiff, Schumer, Nadler, the antisemitic Squad, the Russia hoax, the impeachment sham, tin-horn fascist Democratic lockdown governors, five months of nightly riots in Portland, BLM/ANTIFA, and on and on.

    In short, Democrats and their fellow travelers have one reason to vote with enthusiasm. We have too many to count.

    Turnout!

  10. Well, I guess I am the odd man out on the moderator. I was probably a little spring loaded after I learned that her family spent Christmas in the Obama White House; and that they were mega donors. Bad optics for a debate moderator.

    Maybe I should have stuck it out, but I thought I saw the same pattern early on as in the prevous debate, and the town hall.

    Even after I left the room I could hear the TV well enough to believe that I heard the President being interupted pretty consistently; and I did hear a woman’s voice a lot. Enough so that I concluded that she was interjecting herself excessively.

    I don’t regret missing it; but glad to hear that others found it worthwhile; and really glad to hear that the Judges are giving the President decent grades.

  11. Trump didn’t hit Biden clearly enough on Bobulinski, court-packing, cancel culture, or rioting, like I had hoped.
    Thus, much of the country is still ignorant, of the scale of the Left’s threat to the rule of law, and Const./ civil liberties.

    And, he failed to challenge Biden’s lie on “Mexican rapists”.
    He should’ve used that lie, to segway into the broader issue of the Left’s willingness to tell any lie, to spread paranoia/ hate of the White Patriarchy.

    I wonder what stopped DJT, from announcing the presence of Bobulinski in the audience (and daring the cameraman to not show the honored guest, a navy vet), and specify Bobulinski’s understanding that, indeed, Biden was the “big guy” named as recipient of Chinese funds.
    When Biden whined about Russian “disinfo” on the Hunter scandal, DJT should’ve asked about, not just the laptop, but also “are you accusing Bobulinski of being a Russian stooge?”

  12. Oldflyer-

    Oh he was definitely interrupted a lot. My position on these things has been clear – it’s the same as R.C.’s. I don’t think Republican nominees should ever again acknowledge the authority of the Debate Commission.

    But given that this was going to happen, the moderator could have been a lot worse. That’s all I’m saying. Given that she’s a partisan, she at least tried to give the appearance of asking Biden some tough questions; which, I would add, Wallace did *not.*

    And regardless, Trump handled it just fine. Though I agree with Molly that none of this will change any minds or votes. My standard is pretty low: avoid disaster. Trump did that.

  13. Oldflyer, I can’t watch them either. My wife watches and I listen from a safe distance, in my office, which lets me tune in and out – mostly, out – while I work on other things.

  14. And, I don’t recall DJT referring, to the prospect that ChiComs etc.
    could blackmail Biden, with the Hunter-related dirt yet to be released.
    The country still doesn’t see, that a Dem win will give Harris four years, to finish the job Obama started, in driving the country into a Maoist tyranny, with the GOP, Greens etc. into de facto extinction.

  15. I’m an idiot. I always watch the entire debates.

    I thought Trump did very well. YAY!!

    One thing did drive me absolutely crazy. All the talk about them not being able to find the parents of 500 children. I even heard it on the Hannity show afterward, when Geraldo or someone was upset about it. Hello?? Did the parents not notice their child(ren) are missing? If you can’t find the parent of a child, it’s because the parent doesn’t want to be found, or because the child was kidnapped, and in that case why wouldn’t a parent seek the child in a place like the border of the USA? If you are without your child, YOU are the one who would be going to the authorities and complaining.

    When a child is separated at the border, the childless parent goes to the people who separated them and asks for the kid back. It makes no sense for the authorities to be unable to find a parent, unless there is a reason on the parent’s side to avoid making themselves known.

    No one says “I can’t find the owners of any of 500 handbags, each of which has $100,000 cash in it.” Unless there’s something hinky going on.

    And off topic: Philip Sells, I responded to your comment a few days ago about the CA vote fraud, but maybe too late for you to read it.

  16. Hi, Minta. I went back and found your reply. That was nice of you to write – thanks. 🙂 Rite of passage: interesting – a sort of hazing, then.

    I was never quite sure about that coworker’s beliefs in such things – he seems level-headed enough, but with these kids, you can never be quite sure, of course. 🙂 His last day was this week, so he’s probably packing up for the migration. San Diego, I saw on Ballotpedia, happens to be one of the very few largish cities in the US with a Rep mayor; take that for what it’s worth. We’ll see what my now-former colleague thinks of it all out there. I don’t even know precisely how old he is, but late twenties, anyway.

    I also believe he took along a book that I’d lent him at some point, and perhaps not the one I would have preferred him to keep…. Oh, well. 🙂

  17. On grading the debate, the “experts” are like economists: none of them can agree.
    Thus we know that experting is not a scientific endeavor, and there is no objective truth that they all are expert in assessing.

    The scores are so uniformly the same for each expert, no matter what topic, that they are as predictable as the votes of Olympic figure skating judges.

    https://nypost.com/2020/10/23/who-won-the-final-presidential-debate-experts-grade-trump-biden/

    I also listened with a quarter of an ear while reading the news, but I did hear some of the exchange about illegal immigrants, and agree with Minta: the children were not “lost” by the US authorities.
    I read way too many stories about the kidnapping business a couple of years ago, when Obama was incentivizing people to come with kids because that would immunize them from immediate deportation.

  18. I emphatically agree with the perspective Molly G provides. “Also four years of the Democrats and the left trying to overthrow the 2016 election.” I can see many reasons why President Trump outrages so many people. What surprises me is how little the Democrats and the left see their behaviour as out of normal bounds. One thing I would say about silencing people who support Trump is more about their need to defend themselves against cognitive dissonance than anything good or bad that Trump might have said or done. I get that kind of emotional reaction in myself when someone says something I bone disagree with, but I also recognize my reactiveness as mine. I also accept the possibility that if I felt sufficiently threatened I might behave this badly and not recognize that I had lost it. For what it is worth I think the Trump haters are so thoroughly projecting what is commonly called toxic masculinity or the tyrannical male that they feel their entire value system is being threatened. I noticed with great satisfaction that Heather McDonald recently characterised Trump as an example of healthy masculinity. Jung defined the Masculine Principle – whether manifested in men or women – as ‘knowing what you want and knowing how to get it’. Our president ain’t Pajama Boy.

  19. Some commentator (Megyn Kelly?) made the point that PDJT controlled himself effortlessly in this debate. And that this proved his performance in the first debate was intentional, a strategy, a conscious performance.

  20. I notice one thing. Donald refers to himself as Donald Trump.

    That’s another thing he shares in common with Ymarsakar.

    Enjoy the show, patriots. October surprises aren’t even over, a week to ago. Let alone 2020. Survive to 2021!

  21. A few thoughts as I actually watched the whole thing.

    Best Twitter repost I saw from Townhall: “10 minutes in and whoever got “come on, man!” in the debate drinking game is already under the table.”

    Trump did very well despite the moderator trying to cut off his rebuttals.

    Biden got noticeably tired with about 20 minutes left and was slurring words. Anyone else notice again the “shark eyes”… fully dilated…has to be drug induced.

    Obama must be happy about being thrown under the bus by Biden.

    Thumbs up to Molly for her insightful comment above.

    Biden’s largest mistake was at the end when he went full in on eliminating the oil industry. I think even Trump was a bit shocked that he said it, but jumped right on it to pound it home.

  22. Many good comments here.
    Trump did about as well as he could have, given the set up, and I think he net helped himself. He missed a few points, but he is on the stage and I am not. I score him 8.5/10.
    Biden gave a lot of process talk, phony tough talk (How WOULD he get tough with Iran for interfering with the edition?), and a certain amount of political emoting suitable for morning talk shows. He told some whoppers on energy and healthcare at least. Given that’s his shtik, he didn’t do it badly, even despite some word salad (what he says isn’t about making sense, it is about projecting feelings). So I score him 6.5/10. BUT, he distanced himself from Bernie and AOC, dissing Bernie in the process. I think he hurt himself with his left wing, so net he hurt himself.
    Will it make a difference? Heaven knows.

  23. Who cares what happened at this debate?

    They are going to count, and count, and count those ballots weeks and weeks after November 3rd until Biden scores a decisive win. And no one can do anything about it.

    We will be wearing masks and quarantining the rest of our miserable lives.

  24. Every media headline I saw this morning says Biden won the debate or quotes polls saying Biden won the debate.

    Sigh….

  25. Google blogger has apparently locked me out of my account and won’t reopen it. I was making comments over at Althouse last night about the debate, and the account suddenly stopped sending through my comments. I signed out and tried to sign back in, but each time failed.

  26. Lorenz Gude: ” I noticed with great satisfaction that Heather McDonald recently characterized Trump as an example of healthy masculinity.”

    Excellent point. So many chestless men and women are frightened by masculinity. Old Joe tries to come off as masculine – “C’mon, man!” – but it’s a pose.

    Joe’s ability to tell whoppers without blinking an eye marks him as a typical career politician. Will he address Hunter’s activities? Any truly masculine man would. Meet the issue head on, like a man. My guess is that Joe will rely on the MSM and other partisans to carry his water for him. Weasel out of it – that’s SOP for Swamp creatures.

  27. People are weird. Andrew Sullivan on Twitter was despondent over Trump supposedly crushing Biden in the 1st debate but was positively giddy over Biden’s performance last night.

    It demonstrates how little this is about policy or principle to people like Sullivan and how much it’s about ego. All he can think about is that getting rid of Trump is a return to “normal,” at least for people like him, as though anything is really going to go back to the way it was.

    Mike

  28. physicsguy: My recollection is that last night Biden consistently dropped the “man” from his phrase. It was always just “cmon”. I think he had contrary bets placed on some of the pools. Cheap to win on a technicality. Just like saying he never received a single dime from a foreign entity.

  29. It may have been my imagination, but when Trump complimented the moderator on being fair about 2/3 of the way through, she responded by jumping loudly on his closing phrases. She had talked over perhaps one or two of Trump’s closing words on a couple occasions prior to that. But after, whole phrases were shouted over.

    We Republicans/Conservatives really need a full-on assault (figuratively) on the CPD commission to close it down.

    The most amazing Joe Biden lie, out of many, was his claim that only 1% of catch and release aliens fail to show up for their hearings.

  30. What Joe actually said:

    The catch and release, you know what he’s talking about there? If in fact you had a family came across and they were arrested, they in fact were given a date to show up for their hearing. They were released. And guess what? They showed up for a hearing.

    Trump said only 1% show up. I think neither a majority or 1% was correct under Obama. Here’s an example.

    The debate transcript if you are interested.

  31. OT, while we await neo’s latest batch…

    Jordan Peterson is back from various hospitals and hopes (God willing) to present his work again.

    He still looks shaky — not helped by the dark lighting except for his face which makes it look like he’s telling a ghost story for Halloween.

    We wish him well.
    ________________________________________________

    I have returned home to Toronto after spending much of the last eighteen months in hospitals. I am hoping that my health has improved to the point where I can start producing original content again. Thank you to all who are watching for your support over the course of this trying time. I hope that you all are coping with the COVID crisis successfully.

    –Jordan Peterson
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_6zwVNn88o

  32. JimNorCal:

    Perhaps.

    I have another theory – that he was under the weather in the first debate because he was just starting to get sick, although he didn’t know it.

  33. I have another theory – that he was under the weather in the first debate because he was just starting to get sick, although he didn’t know it.

    neo: I had a similar thought that Trump got sick from the stress of the debate on top of all the other stress which goes with being an active POTUS.

    Meanwhile, Biden barely works at all, judging by all his campaign “lids.” Covid has been quite a break for Biden and the Democrats.

    If Biden is elected, given his deficits, barely showing up to campaign and clear corruption, it will be one of those bizarre chapters in the history books. And a sad testament to American voters in the 21st C.

  34. MBunge said:

    All he can think about is that getting rid of Trump is a return to “normal,” at least for people like him, as though anything is really going to go back to the way it was.

    It reminds me of one of the Joker’s quotes from The Dark Knight, slightly retouched: “The [Dems] want you gone so they can get back to ‘the way things were.’ But you and I know there’s no going back. You’ve changed things – forever.”
    But seriously, I mostly agree with the idea that for a lot of these people, it’s about getting back to ‘normal,’ even if ‘normal’ is kind of dumb – ‘managing the decline’ and all that. Part of the animus is probably because in the minds of quite a few people, the trauma of Everybody’s Favorite Pathogen has been successfully associated (aversion-therapy type of conditioning) with the President, simply because he was the one who happened to be king of the hill at the time. Yes, there was of course plenty of messaging by the Left to work upon those minds, but it may not have been necessary if a given voter’s mind was impressionable enough to begin with.
    Also, as Gregory commented the other day, for the elite types in that set, it’s probably in part about the prospect of losing that gravy train to Shanghai. That’s the ancient motivation of lucre in action.

  35. Nothing ever goes back to the “way it was” it is one of those essential characteristics of “time” and “the past.”

  36. “I noticed with great satisfaction that Heather McDonald recently characterised Trump as an example of healthy masculinity. Jung defined the Masculine Principle – whether manifested in men or women – as ‘knowing what you want and knowing how to get it’. Our president ain’t Pajama Boy.” – Lorenz

    A Rush Limbaugh listener talked about his “conversion moment” in 2016, after the Access Hollywood tape was revealed, and he thought it was all over.

    https://redstate.com/beccalower/2020/10/23/opinion-rush-limbaugh-trump-2016-n266384

    “And oh my gosh, what does Trump do? He sat Bill [Clinton’s] accusers in the front row. He immediately dismissed the ‘Access Hollywood’ video as ‘locker room talk’… which is the freaking truth…and then, he proceeded to demolish Hillary.

    And I could not believe what I saw and heard. I have never seen that kind of strength, spirit, fearlessness, and leadership before.

    And that’s when I knew he was going to be the greatest president of my lifetime. And I’m so sorry for what the media and Democrats have done to him and put him through Hell.

    Rush reprises his own story of how, after the tape appeared, he wrote every Trump advisor he knew with what was obviously the correct advice.
    (This was the first time I had read of it, but it should be better known.)

    I said, ‘Whatever you do, do not apologize for this! Whatever you do, do not express regret for this at all — and I’ll tell you why. This is an October Surprise.

    […]

    I said, ‘If you people in the Trump camp, if you hang tough, this is not gonna hurt you. You can win this thing. You can triumph over this thing.’ I firmly believed it. I really believed the American people are fed up with these October Surprises. They’re fed up with this stuff.”

    We are still fed up with this stuff.

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