Biden, Obama upon reflection
...There is more. Hanson captures the dishonesty of the Biden presentation of "facts" that he just makes up to fit an invalid argument. It is a much more realistic look at the debate than that found on the NY Times Op-ed page discussed in the post below. What is frustrating to conservatives is how little the liberals seem to care about facts and the truth. They would rather just make it up to fit their world view the way Biden does.
... Sophisticates would rather listen to the six-term Senator Biden suavely and masterfully mislead (on every thing from the legislative responsibilities of the Vice President and confusion about Article I of the Constitution to Hezbollah in Lebanon) than an honest and sincere Palin speak directly to the people. Everyone else would not.So yes, Biden sounded the more impressive in terms of recall and facts, but it was the transitory experience of a mint that melts almost instantaneously—once you realize that almost all of the sweeping sweet assertions you just heard were, on reflection, simply untrue and so now gone and forgotten. The story today is an embarrassing fact-checking of Biden’s bombast to a far greater degree than is true of Palin’s assertions.
Listening to Biden was like hearing a probate lawyer who pounds you with facts and figures to convince you why his fee is larger that the size of the estate, expecting that you will leave the office reluctantly convinced, depressed, and broke, even as you realize that all his talents were put to no good use.
So the debate had the character of one of those 1940s “champ” fight movies, in which the deft, cocky and more refined puncher beats up—at the beginning—the nervous sweaty challenger with the far greater heart. A man with three decades in the Senate, who reminds us ad nauseam of where he was and what he has done almost every second, in theory should have easily won; but this simply did not happen, in part to Palin’s charisma and Biden’s pontifications and distortions.
What worries me is not that Palin could not do the job of Vice President, but that Obama may well be President, a man of dubious associations, a hyper-partisan voting record, a disturbing if not vicious campaign history in Illinois, with large lacunae in his past at Columbia, and before and during Harvard, and a record of very little accomplishment if not frequent failure as an ambitious community organizer, while a politicized professor at Chicago Law School without a trace of scholarly publication. The pattern is the same: rhetoric, identity politics, and charisma substitute for accomplishment as he goes from one position to the next before the assessment of the last is in. In contrast, the mayorship in an Alaskan outback, local politics, the governorship of Alaska, at least suggest she had to perform in the give and take of rough and tumble Alaskan politics and be responsible for budgets, decisions, and hiring and firing. In that regard, Obama reminds me of a lot of the very bright people I went to graduate school with, and Palin the very independent and reliable people I farmed with.
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We are so ready to adjudicate political wisdom in terms of instant recall of facts, clever political response, repartee, and spin, to the point of never asking cui bono? What did all that learning and recall of Biden’s matter when he could not even admit honestly that McCain wants to do all that it takes to win in Iraq and leave a stable government behind and Obama all that he can to get out as soon as possible?
No one believes McCain cut off funds to deny the troops; everyone knows that a cessation of funds was one of the ways Obama wished to get us out of Iraq: rightly or wrongly, Obama wanted us completely out by March 2008.
Why not simply admit that in the heady days of March 2003, Biden was all for charging into Iraq, (that was why he voted for authorization, contrary to his debate spin), then bailed when things got bad (about the very time when Obama, in contrast, for a moment said he had no substantial differences from George Bush on Iraq), and then wanted to trisect the country, and now, in his fourth incarnation, claims he never really said Obama’s views were dangerous on Iraq. Why the contortions? No wonder we empathized with Sarah when she too was confused by Bidenism.
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