After last night

 J.D. Vance squared off against our own Minnesota Governor Tim Walz in a debate hosted by CBS News last night. I have posted the full video at the bottom. CBS News has posted the transcript here.

Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan. Vance bested Walz by a substantial margin. Indeed, to borrow the metaphor that Howard Cosell applied to boxing contests, Vance ever so gently pummeled Walz’s face into a bloody pulp. Walz hung in there until the end, but Vance easily outpointed him.

Insofar as the debate featured the vice presidential candidates, one might dismiss the significance of Vance’s victory. But Vance did more than pummel Walz. He made the case for Donald Trump more effectively than Trump did in his debate with Kamala Harris or has in his own rallies — both in tone and substance.

Vance effectively reminded voters during the debate that despite the pretense of Harris and Walz that Harris is running as some kind of outsider, she is actually the vice president serving in the incumbent administration. Harris isn’t fighting the power, she is the power.

At one point Vance put it this way: “If Kamala Harris has such great plans for how to address middle class problems, then she ought to do them now, not when asking for a promotion, but in the job the American people gave her three and a half years ago.” If it’s time to move forward or move on, it’s time to move on from her.

Vance conveyed calm and understanding. Walz was overamped, bug-eyed, and on the verge of shorting out. His mode was that of the fast-talking salesman à la Joe Isuzu. He lied freely, as he always does and did again last night, for example, in the matter of the Minnesota abortion statutes he has proudly signed into law. It seemed to me that the debate might well affect persuadable voters who tuned in favorably toward Trump.

O’Donnell and Brennan left no doubt that they are the kind of partisan media shills with whom we have grown overfamiliar. Everything they “know” is false, yet they believe they are the stewards and sentinels of the truth. They believe in nothing more fervently than their own superiority. They ooze contempt for the likes of of, well, us. They believe it their sacred duty to set us straight.

They reminded me that it was CBS News that brought us Rathergate. More than anything else, however, it seemed to me that O’Donnell and Brennan wanted to retain the esteem of the colleagues at CBS and other corporate media outlets.

The moderators of the debate were not to “fact-check” the candidates as the ABC News moderators “fact-checked” Trump (and Trump alone) during his debate with Harris. And yet when it came to the famous Haitian immigrants of Springfield, Ohio, Brennan chimed in to chide Vance’s reference to the illegal immigration facilitated by the Biden/Harris administration: “Just to clarify for our viewers, Springfield, Ohio does have a large number of Haitian migrants who have legal status.”

Vance responded: “The rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact check, and since you’re fact checking me, I think it’s important to say what’s actually going on.” Vance sought to seize the opportunity to explicate the new meaning of legal status under the regime of Biden and Harris: “So there’s an application called the CBP One app, where you can go on as an illegal migrant, apply for asylum or apply for parole, and be granted legal status at the wave of a Kamala Harris open border wand.” CBS then cut Vance’s microphone (video below).

In its editorial this morning, the New York Post observes that when Walz “told the howler that ‘illegal border crossings are down compared to when Donald Trump left office,’ which is not even close to true, no one let out of a peep. Some ‘facts’ are too good to check.”

The Post editorial places the CBS shutdown in historical context: “This was the most shameful moment in a long history of shameful moments by moderators biased against Republicans. They ‘fact checked’ the truth, then stopped the politician from responding.” The visible censorship provided a chilling glimpse of our recent past, our present, and our future.

In Walz’s case, many “facts” were too good to check, as in the matter of Walz’s denial that the Minnesota abortion laws he has signed say what they say and do what they do. You can look it up (which Vance had obviously done).

The moderators purported to raise the issues that are most on the mind of voters. The second issue the moderators brought up was “climate change.” They even attributed the ferocity of Hurricane Helene to it” “Scientists say climate change makes these hurricanes larger, stronger and more deadly because of the historic rainfall.” I believe this proposition has been refuted repeatedly, but this is my point. “Climate change” barely makes the cut in Gallup’s measurement of public perception of Most Important Problem. Lumped together with “Environment/Pollution/Climate” among the set of Non-Economic Problems mentioned by those polled in September, it comes in at number 23 (assuming I’m reading the poll fairly). Whatever it is, I’m sure it’s number 1 for O’Donnell and her friends and that’s what counts.

Tim Walz is a compulsive liar. He lies about everything. The lie that has most recently come to light, courtesy of Minnesota Public Radio and the Washington Free Beacon, is Walz’s contention he was in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square protests. (MPR buried Walz’s lie deep in the story while it was the subject of the Free Beacon story.) Asked about it by Brennan, Walz went into his Joe Isuzu mode:

TW: Yeah. Well, and to the folks out there who didn’t get at the top of this, look, I grew up in small, rural Nebraska, town of 400. Town that you rode your bike with your buddies till the streetlights come on, and I’m proud of that service. I joined the National Guard at 17, worked on family farms, and then I used the GI bill to become a teacher. Passionate about it, a young teacher. My first year out, I got the opportunity in the summer of 89 to travel to China, 35 years ago, be able to do that. I came back home and then started a program to take young people there. We would take basketball teams, we would take baseball teams, we would take dancers, and we would go back and forth to China. The issue for that was, was to try and learn. Now, look, my community knows who I am. They saw where I was at. They, look, I will be the first to tell you I have poured my heart into my community. I’ve tried to do the best I can, but I’ve not been perfect. And I’m a knucklehead at times, but it’s always been about that. Those same people elected me to Congress for twelve years. And in Congress I was one of the most bipartisan people. Working on things like farm bills that we got done, working on veterans benefits. And then the people of Minnesota were able to elect me to governor twice. So look, my commitment has been from the beginning, to make sure that I’m there for the people, to make sure that I get this right. I will say more than anything, many times, I will talk a lot. I will get caught up in the rhetoric. But being there, the impact it made, the difference it made in my life. I learned a lot about China. I hear the critiques of this. I would make the case that Donald Trump should have come on one of those trips with us. I guarantee you he wouldn’t be praising Xi Jinping about COVID. And I guarantee you he wouldn’t start a trade war that he ends up losing. So this is about trying to understand the world. It’s about trying to do the best you can for your community, and then it’s putting yourself out there and letting your folks understand what it is. My commitment, whether it be through teaching, which I was good at, or whether it was being a good soldier or was being a good member of Congress, those are the things that I think are the values that people care about.

MB: Governor, just to follow up on that, the question was, can you explain the discrepancy?

TW: No. All I said on this was, is, I got there that summer and misspoke on this, so I will just, that’s what I’ve said. So I was in Hong Kong and China during the democracy protest, went in, and from that, I learned a lot of what needed to be in governance.

Quotable quote: “I will talk a lot.” The video is below.

Walz put Democrat projection on full display toward the end of the debate: “Now, the thing I’m most concerned about is the idea that imprisoning your political opponents already laying the groundwork for people not accepting this.” You got a problem with that?

Asked about January 6, Vance alluded to the system of censorship documented in the Twitter Files: “I think that is a much bigger threat to democracy than anything that we’ve seen in this country in the last four years, in the last 40 years.” In response, Walz cited the proposition that “You can’t yell fire in a crowded theater. That’s the test. That’s the Supreme court test.”

We didn’t get a fact check on that either, but it isn’t the Supreme Court test. The Supreme Court test comes in two prongs set forth in Brandenburg v. Ohio: (1) speech can be prohibited if it is “directed at inciting or producing imminent lawless action” and (2) it is “likely to incite or produce such action.” You can tell that Walz’s hometown press hasn’t tested him. Jonathan Turley commented on X: “Asked about the largest censorship system in our history, Walz suggests that the Internet should be treated as a giant crowded theater where opposing views are a cry of fire…”

Full video of the debate is below.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2024/10/after-last-night-62.php