During my years in Toastmasters, I participated in a few
debates. What I learned from that experience is that a skilled debater can take
either side of an issue and still win a debate – and I did that more than once.
Most of the country watched last night’s debate between Joe
Biden and Donald Trump – and it was painful to watch.
The REASON it was painful to watch can be explained by two terms
that are more commonly associated with debates.
The first is the Gish gallop.
It’s a rhetorical
technique in which someone throws out a fast string of lies, non-sequiturs, and
specious arguments, so many that it is impossible to fact-check or rebut them
in the amount of time it took to say them. Trying to figure out how to respond
makes the opponent look confused, because they don’t know where to start
grappling with the flood that has just hit them.
Joe Biden started out the debate in a non-compelling manner,
but got stronger as the debate went on. In contrast, Trump came out strong but faded and became less coherent over
time. His entire performance was either lies or rambling non-sequiturs. He lied
so incessantly throughout the evening that it took CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale
almost three minutes, speaking quickly, to get through the list.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/june-27-2024
The second term that was
very much in evident was gaslighting, which is defined as accusing others of
crimes that you yourself are guilty of.
Here are some examples:
Trump said that the deficit is
at its highest level ever and that the U.S. trade deficit is at its highest
ever: both of those things happened during his administration. He lied that
there were no terrorist attacks during his presidency; there were many. He said
that Biden wants to quadruple people’s taxes—this is “pure fiction,” according
to Dale—and lied that his tax cuts paid for themselves; they have, in fact,
added trillions of dollars to the national debt.
Trump also lied that the U.S.
has provided more aid to Ukraine than Europe has when it’s the other way
around, and he was off by close to $100 billion when he named the amount the
U.S. has provided to Ukraine. He was off by millions when he talked about how
many migrants have crossed the border under Biden, and falsely claimed that
some of Biden’s policies—like funding historically Black colleges and
universities (HBCUs) and reducing the price of insulin to $35 a month—were his
own accomplishments.
At the end of the evening,
pundits were calling not for Trump—a man liable for sexual assault and business
fraud, convicted of 34 felonies, under three other indictments, who lied
pathologically—to step down, but for Biden to step down…because he looked and
sounded old. At 81, Biden is indeed old, but that does not distinguish him much
from Trump, who is 78 and whose inability to answer a question should raise
concerns about his mental acuity.
Joe Biden should have spent
more time highlighting the accomplishments that were achieved during his term
of office- and it is a very long list – and you can read them in the link
below:
Even though many of the pundits
on television felt that Biden should drop out, there are numerous reasons that
he won’t:
President
Joe Biden’s halting debate performance has led some in his own party to begin
questioning whether he should be replaced on the ballot before November.
There
is no evidence Biden is willing to end his campaign. And it would be nearly
impossible for Democrats to replace him unless he chooses to step aside.
Here’s
why:
Delegates Biden
won in the primaries and the delegates are obligated to support him
Every
state has already held its presidential primary. Democratic rules mandate that
the delegates Biden won remain obligated to support him at the party’s upcoming
national convention unless he tells them he’s leaving the race.
Biden
indicated that he had no plans to do that, telling supporters in Atlanta
shortly after he left the debate stage, “Let’s keep going.” Biden campaign
spokesperson Lauren Hitt was even clearer, saying Friday: “Of course he’s not
dropping out.”
The
conventions and their rules are controlled by the political parties. The
Democratic National Committee could convene before the convention opens on Aug.
19 and change how things will work, but that isn’t likely as long as Biden
wants to continue seeking reelection.
The
current rules read: “Delegates elected to the national convention pledged to a
presidential candidate shall in all good conscience reflect the sentiments of
those who elected them.”
VP Kamala Harris
couldn’t automatically replace Biden
The
vice president is Biden’s running mate, but that doesn’t mean she can swap in
for him at the top of the ticket by default. Biden also can’t decree that she
replace him should he suddenly decide to leave the race.
The
Democratic National Convention is being held in Chicago, but the party has
announced that it will hold a virtual roll call to formally nominate Biden
before in-person proceedings begin. The exact date for the roll call has not
yet been set.
If
Biden opts to abandon his reelection campaign, Harris would likely join other
top Democratic candidates looking to replace him. But that would probably
create a scenario where she and others end up lobbying individual state
delegations at the convention for their support.
That
hasn’t happened for Democrats since 1960, when John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B.
Johnson jockeyed for votes during that year’s Democratic convention in Los
Angeles.
Other potential Democratic candidates would also face
challenges
In
addition to the vice president, others that had endorsed Biden in 2024 while
harboring their own presidential aspirations for future cycles include
California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Pennsylvania Gov.
Josh Shapiro, Illinois Gov. J. B. Pritzker and California Rep. Ro Khanna.
Still
others who Biden bested during the party’s 2020 presidential primary could also
try again, including Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Elizabeth Warren of
Massachusetts and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, as well as Transportation
Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
If
Biden were to abruptly leave the race, conservative groups have suggested they
will file lawsuits around the country, potentially questioning the legality of
the Democratic candidate’s name on the ballot.
But
Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings
Institution in Washington, who wrote a book about the presidential nominating
process and is also a member of the Democratic National Committee’s rulemaking
arm, said that courts have consistently stayed out of political primaries as
long as parties running them weren’t doing anything that would contradict other
constitutional rights, such as voter suppression based on race.
“This
is very clear constitutionally that this is in the party’s purview,” Kamarck
said in an interview before the debate. “The business of nominating someone to
represent a political party is the business of the political party.”
One
fact that Biden mentioned that should be mentioned a lot more often is this fact:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/10/16/opinion/donald-trump-worst-president.html
Mr. Trump
stands without any real rivals as the worst American president in modern
history. In 2016, his bitter account of the nation’s ailments struck a chord
with many voters. But the lesson of the last four years is that he cannot solve
the nation’s pressing problems because he is the nation’s most pressing
problem.
He
is a racist demagogue presiding over an increasingly diverse country; an
isolationist in an interconnected world; a showman forever boasting about
things he has never done, and promising to do things he never will.
He
has shown no aptitude for building, but he has managed to do a great deal of
damage. He is just the man for knocking things down.
Only 4 of 44 of Trump's former cabinet are endorsing him this time:
https://www.businessinsider.com/members-trumps-cabinet-just-4-endorsed-him-2024-nbc-2023-7
If you need any more convincing that Trump should definitely NOT be elected in November, there is something called Project 2025, which The Atlantic covered in great detail last September:
Perhaps the most striking aspect of
the right-wing push to dismantle the federal civil service is how open its
conservative leaders are about their designs. They are not cloaking their aims
in euphemisms about making government more effective and efficient. They are
stating unequivocally that federal employees must give their loyalty to the
president, and that he or she should be able to remove anyone insufficiently
devoted to the cause. The fundamental structure of the executive branch, and
the independence with which many of its agencies have operated for decades,
these conservatives argue, represents a misreading of the Constitution and a
usurping of the president’s power.
“We’re at the 100-year mark with the
notion of a technocratic state of dispassionate experts,” Paul Dans, who served
as chief of staff of the Office of Personnel Management during the Trump
administration, told me. “The results are in: It’s an utter failure.”
Dans is the director of the Heritage
Foundation’s Project 2025, a $22 million effort to recruit an
army of conservative appointees and lay the foundation for what the project
hopes will be the next Republican administration. He uses terms like “smash”
and “wrecking ball” to describe what conservatives have in mind for the federal
government, comparing their effort to the 1984 Apple commercial in
which a runner takes down an Orwellian bureaucracy by chucking a sledgehammer
at a movie screen.
The project has released a
920-page playbook detailing a conservative policy
agenda, including its vision for an executive branch that functions fully under
the command of the president. “The great challenge confronting a conservative
President is the existential need for aggressive use of the vast powers of the
executive branch,” writes Russ Vought, a former director of the Office of
Management and Budget under Trump, in one section. The president must use
“boldness to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will.” Vought
now runs the Center for Renewing America, another organization serving as an
incubator for policies that Trump’s allies want to implement if the former
president—or another conservative Republican—regains the White House.
No one ever said that Biden is
a perfect candidate, so it’s worth while to go to the 2020 Democratic primaries.
Joe Biden lost the primaries in
Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada before finally winning the primary in South
Carolina.
No one ever said that Biden is a perfect candidate, so it’s worth while to go to the 2020 Democratic primaries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Democratic_Party_presidential_primaries
At the 2020 August Democratic Convention, Biden managed to squeak out a mere 51.7% of the vote. Bernie Sanders was second, with 26.2 % of the vote, and Biden got the nomination because the parry felt he was the best candidate to beat Donald Trump- and they were right.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidential_election
Two large questions will have a huge bearing on the final outcome:
1) On July 11, Trump will receive his sentence for the hush money case in New York, four days before the start of the Republican convention
2) THE major issue in this election will be abortion and women's health, and the GOP is definitely on the losing end of this topic.
The 2020 presidential election was close, since Biden only got 51.3% of the vote, but he still got 7,000.000 more votes than Trump. It is likely that the 2024 election will also be close. However, it the Democratic party stands firmly behind Biden, and it manages to do reasonably well in the September 10, we will be spared the disaster of another Trump term.
The picture below is a picture of a horse’s ass. Also in the
picture is a rear view of a horse:
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