J.D. Vance is a slicker, glibber liar than Donald Trump—a low bar—but in the end he's no less deceitful. He made himself look like a reasonable guy last night, but only by misstating things at almost every turn. A few examples:
- Climate change is "weird science," and the way to fight it is to make everything in America.
- Harris has fought new oil and gas production.
Both oil and gas production have gone up every single year of the Biden/Harris administration. - Ha ha, we're not really going to deport 25 million illegal immigrants. Just a million criminals, and then just make it harder for them to work.
- And maybe we'll split up families, maybe not. Let's move on.
- I've never supported a national ban on abortion.
- Gas, groceries and housing are unaffordable now.
Wages for ordinary blue-collar workers have increased faster than prices under the Biden/Harris administration. Nothing is unaffordable. - Illegal immigration causes soaring housing prices.
- Donald Trump rescued Obamacare and did everything he could to improve it.
- We're going to protect people with preexisting conditions.
- Everyone protests elections. Donald Trump relinquished power peacefully.
- No, it's not clear that Joe Biden really won the 2020 election.
So who cares that he is a lying, misogynistic, racist, homophobic, xenophobic, two faced scum bag. That just means he is the perfect MAGA wet dream.
Apparently, he is now Trump's crown prince and heir apparent in their MAGA universe. Don Jr must be real unhappy about that.
"Don Jr must be real unhappy about that."
Silver linings.
+1
I saw something on that recently, that it was Don Jr. who picked Vance. If that's true, then it predicts that when Donnie fails, he will blame it on Jr.
It'll be anyone and everyones fault except Donald J Trumps.
As if you needed an explanation as to why he didn't want fact checkers at the debate. It was so he could lie till his heart's content.
Poorly formatted, Kevin, but yeah, a bunch of nonsensical things.
Making heavy things (like battery cells), or essential high tech things (like microchips), or finishing goods made from our natural resources (like wood products) all should be made in the US as much as possible. Republicans have no plan for how that'll happen, tho.
Wait. What about exports. Will all exports now cease and be consumed by Americans? If not, how will they be shipped?
"Making heavy things (like battery cells), or essential high tech things (like microchips), or finishing goods made from our natural resources (like wood products) all should be made in the US as much as possible."
Why? Because of carbon? It's often easier to ship things across the ocean than it is to ship them across a continent, so even "heavy" things might make more sense to import than to, say, build in Georgia and truck to Oregon.
Well you know there's this thing they invented a little while ago called railroads. So you don't have to truck it to Oregon.
And the ports of Savannah and Charleston are frequented by ships that can use this little piece of infrastructure built a few years ago called the Panama Canal.
So we ship the timber to China by sea, they ship it to sawmills by rail, then the wood goes to furniture factories by rail, then the furniture goes to the port by rail, then it gets shipped to a port in the US by ship, then it gets shipped to a warehouse by rail or truck, then it gets shipped to a distributor by truck.
Yes that makes more sense.
And NPR had a program a few years ago about the Chinese government decision to sell furniture below cost to kill the American industry.
Because China is a genocidal totalitarian dictatorship that we have a reasonable chance of going to war with in the next 10 years. And a world with China as the dominant superpower is objectively worse than a world with the USA as the dominant superpower (particularly for Americans!). And Ukraine is showing us that we lack the industrial capacity to win a war with China.
Well that's just UNFAIR!!11!! Using all these "facts" and "data" and "graphs" and things!! Those are just LIBRUL UNIVERSITY EELEETIST stuff!!
And also HE CAN'T RESPOND!! How do we know there aren't ALTERNATIVE facts? You're not allowed to say these things unless you show BOTH SIDES!!
Also you need to take him SERIOUSLY not "literally," which is why none of this silly "fact-checking" stuff matters.
And also, just remember you better watch what you say, cuz when the Day Of Extreme Violence that the Leader has promised finally comes, we're gonna know who said what!!!
"Everyone protests elections. Donald Trump relinquished power peacefully."
From the newly unsealed court deposition made by the special counsel: Trump -"Make them riot. Do it," on being told that the crowd at the Capitol could turn violent.
Vance wants us to remember the peaceful drum circles, the faint odor of cannabis wafting over the Washington Mall, the chants of "What do we want?" "Fairer elections in the future!" "When to we want them?" "Now, or, er, in the near future at the very least!"
In the back, a muddy, barefoot couple in macrame vests is making out.
Jan 6. Groovy, man.
Of course, that's the way we all remember it. And, they were all waving the U.S. flag with pride. /s
The thing on Obamacare just gets a gape-jawed, thousand yard stare. I mean, what the everloving fuck? Trump made destroying the ACA the cornerstone of his administration and thank heaven he didn't succeed, but it came within one petulant thumbs-down from John McCain of happening.
The balls on this guy...
It doesn’t take balls to lie. Lack of a conscience or soul will unleash most people’s ability to lie shamelessly too.
As will a tenuous grip on reality. Do you think that Trump has an accurate and detailed recollection of what Trump did or said or thought six years ago? If not, why would anybody trying to curry favor with Trump bother trying to have accurate and detailed knowledge of same?
Especially since Vance wasn't even in office during Trump's presidency--instead, he was dicking around with founding a failed nonprofit that was little more than a front for Vance's resume-building.
"a failed nonprofit"? How does a nonprofit fail? Did they make a profit?
How does a nonprofit fail? By failing to accomplish its purpose, failing to raise money, and failing to continue existing. In specific, you can read all about Vance's failure with Our Ohio Renewal:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/08/us/politics/jd-vance-ohio-senate-nonprofit.html
If politicians learn they can succeed by lying and/or committing crimes with no negative consequences, we’ll see more politicians lying and committing crimes to win and get everything they want. Consequences are what keeps most people from becoming total assholes to other people. Alas, it looks like the US is going to need a decade or more of watching politicians lie and crime all the time before Americans decide to vote for more decent people, by which point elections might be cancelled outright or rendered pointless (through gerrymandering and other rule changes).
That's the plan.
Politicians lie. Trump and Vance didn't invent lying, they've just carried it to new extremes, like Moscow Mitch with the filibuster.
I'm getting old, and I haven't believed an uncorroborated official statement from the White House since Kennedy was president, and I was only eight when he was assassinated. Why am I so skeptical? Because politicians lie and have never, in my lifetime, suffered negative consequences from doing so.
" . . . have never, in my lifetime, suffered negative consequences from doing so."
You remember the Kennedy assassination and you don't remember Richard Nixon being forced to resign?
Reagan got two terms, and one was an astoundingly huge victory.
W Bush got two terms and were both based on incredibly astounding huge lies.
No, they didn't suffer at all.
I could quibble but I'll give you that one. Politicians lie and Nixon is the only American one in my lifetime who suffered negative consequences from doing so.
Outside the US, there was a Brit named, if I recall, Profumo who was driven from office for lying to Parliament. The fact remains that lying is a very low risk transgression for politicians.
It seems odd to me that no o e talks about the easiest, most humane way to get a lot of illegal immigrants out of the country: amnesty.
Not “they get to stay despite their queue jumping and illegal behavior” amnesty, but rather a program where if they voluntarily report and self-deport within a certain timeframe, that after two years or so their immigration record will be wiped clear and their entry ban removed.
I’d bet several million people would take this deal because they’d qualify for some legal immigration path or another once their record was clear.
There is research that the number of illegal immigrants would drop by about a 1/3, iirc, if we opened the border. The problem is, they get here and can't leave. Free migration lets them come and go.
It's all bullshit, all the things Kevin points out, but the illegal immigration bit is the worst. Seriously, they're driving up the prices of homes? How the everloving fuck did he come up with that?
When I try to get numbers on how long unauthorized immigrants have been in the U.S. what usually comes up is a Pew Research paper from 2011. It indicates 35% had been here for 15 years or more and 28% 10-14 years. Since Pew also indicated 10 million unauthorized immigrants and if you assume the majority of those people are still here, that means 5 million people here over 20 years. Long enough to have kids and even grandkids. These people are de facto citizens and it is impossible to imagine them leaving voluntarily for any period of time
I think you have it backwards. Those are precisely the people who’d take the deal, as they would have a quick, nearly automatic route back.
Family separation is a routine part of legal immigration. People suck it up all the time.
"It seems odd to me that no o e talks about the easiest, most humane way to get a lot of illegal immigrants out of the country: amnesty"
Well, part of the reason that nobody talks about it is that none of this is a good faith argument anyway. Example: Vance, when people point out that the fictional pet-eating Haitian immigrants he froths about are actually legal immigrants, says some variation of "well, they're all illegal in my eyes." Vance just doesn't like immigrants, or maybe people of color, but can't say that because that's nazi shit. So he rants about pet-eating and immigrants buying up all the nice houses and other nonsense.
Think about it. Inflation is down, unemployment is down, crime is down, the stock market is up, wages are up, manufacturing is up, we lead the world in technology across sector after sector after sector--what's the fucking problem? And what does it have to do with a few percent of the population being foreign-born (esp. since that's nothing new)? See, people like Vance like to talk about illegal immigration not because there are actually any significant problems on that front, but because they don't have any solutions to offer to any actual significant problems.
Put another way: nobody talks about "amnesty" or that bill that died in the senate in response to Trump/Vance ranting about pet-eating because policy solutions are orthagonal to the purpose of ranting. It's like responding to some puritan preacher fulminating about how we are all sinners in the hands of an angry god and so we must go to church and listen to the preacher all day long by suggesting that if there were less inequality there would be less sin so we should found a welfare state. The person ranting about sin/foreigners isn't interested in solutions. That's not why they are ranting.
"How ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen gay Vegas?" -- Bunny Lebowski
Thinking about the million criminal deportation comment it occurs to me that what Vance is doing is lowering expectations. Actually deporting 20 million people would be extremely difficult. Nearly impossible without a huge deportation force, concentration camps, and likely tons of civil unrest, perhaps becoming extremely violent. While there are some who would relish that (Christian Nationalists, Stephen Miller, and various Q conspiracy nutcakes) it’s likely that most of Trump’s big money fans don’t see that as conducive to their businesses.
Changing the number to 1 million makes it easier to claim success when some number below that is actually deported but still make life miserable for many and thus keep Trump’s fans happy.
That presumes things were either already affordable at the start of the Biden administration, or were close to being so.
So they have not fought successfully… 🙂 Still, such production increases, while music to the ears of the astrophotographer jaunt set, is not music to the ears of the climate-change set.
For number 6, it’s disingenuous to show a chart that’s only for blue collar workers. I’m not a blue collar worker nor are any of my friends or family. Yet we are all impacted by higher prices.
Generally it is assumed that blue collar workers make less than me and you and your family. Not all of them, but most of them live closer to the edge.
No one gives a shit if your income isn't going up as fast as the cost of a Mercedes.
Having to buy the c class instead of the s class is a tragedy on par with not being able to afford groceries, healthcare and some random emergency. Have some sympathy!
😜
Have some cheese with your whine. Aldi has some very good aged Gouda and Cheddar at a reasonable price.
Don’t forget Vance’s claim that Trump supported a peaceful transfer of power by telling his minions to “fight like hell!”.
You could tell they were all celebrating American Democracy and the election of a new president by all the things they stole and the crap they left on the walls of Congress. Doesn't every tourist do that? /s
JD reminds me a lot of Stephen Moore. the GOP's favorite "economist", who can glibly and convincingly spout off "facts" on demand. They are both slicker than a greased pig but JD isn't a deadbeat dad so it won't cost him a job. You can't win a debate with guys like that.
Vance has proven he's an even more effective liar than Trump.
"Vance has proven he's an even more effective liar than Trump."
Knock this shit off. Trump isn't an effective liar, and neither is Vance. Both are deeply unpopular, and it is plain that their lack of solutions, odious personalities, and yes, propensity for blatant and stupid dishonesty costs them support.
We really, really need to stop buying into the myth that these people are formidable, powerful, effective people. Trump has won exactly one election in his life, and it was a fluke. His record since then is one of losses--either personally in 2020, or via proxy when he lost Congress in 2018 and served as a drag on Rs generally ever since. Similarly, Vance has one exactly one election--in 2022! this guy is a child!--and he underperformed the republican running for governor on the ballot by nearly 400,000 votes. In other words, 400,000 Ohio voters out of 2.6 million willing to vote for a Republican governor were not willing to vote for Vance as a senator.
These people are weird, they have bad ideas, they are dishonest, they are unpopular, and we need to focus on that going into November, not donating our efforts and mindspace to pumping up their mythos.
" Trump has won exactly one election in his life, and it was a fluke."
The idea that somebody can become a president of the USA just by "a fluke" is imbecilic.
Uh, oh, here it comes.
You're very fond of this idea. You don't think luck had any role in 2016? From what I remember even Trump was surprised he won.
Luck has substanial part, but on its own it wouldn't be enogh. It required also skills, first to bamboozle the primary republicans voters, and then enough voters to vote for him the general election. Considering what a POS he is, that is quite a skill.
I am not saying he is a genius or even smart. But he is skilled bamboozler, and that makes him dangerous. The sane Republicans failed to appreciate it, which is why they lost their party. If not enough American voters recognize it, US will lose its democracy.
Saying Vance is more effective with his lies than Trump isn't saying much. Vance can fake sincerity better than Trump. Plus he can lie strategically. Trump can't. I'm not sure if his cult believes Trump and Vance because they truly do or they just don't care.
Yeah, but you obviously weren't making a "this short guy is slightly taller than this other short guy" kinda point--you said that Vance was an even more effective liar than Trump, which conveys a sense that it's notable that Vance could be better because Trump is just so good at it.
My point is that these are both deeply unpopular men, and that their lying is laughable and detestable. It isn't effective, it's a drag on their chances, and so for the love of god can we please stop portraying whatever stupid quality Trump and Trump-adjacent people demonstrate as some sort of strength to be reckoned with? Doing so only helps convince people tempted to support him that he's formidable and it's good to be on the team of a formidable person.
Trump & Vance, --the only ticket in history where both their wives vote for the other party.
"The sweet reasonable deceit" is a camouflage. It is meant to distract from the heist of democracy that is being planned by the post-Trump MAGA (and is hinted at in Project 2025). Jack Smith has done an admirable job in detailing the ruthless knavery of Trump (which is a foretaste of what could follow). My biggest regret about a possible Trump victory in November is that all of Smith's evidence would be suppressed, thanks to SCOTUS's egregious notions of presidential immunity.
Here's just deceit from his running mate.
"Trump says he would veto a federal abortion ban if elected again." As per CNN. He'll sign anything a Republican controlled congress puts in front of him. Who the fuck does he think he's fooling?