How many times do we see during basketball and football games in particular a player penalized or actually thrown out after retaliating to a low-blow from an opposing player, only to get whistled by the ref who did not see the original infraction?
Apparently there's a lot of Republican stage-outrage at Joe Biden's ruthless and rude debating behavior. I see in the online comments lots of opinions that Biden was a bully and a mean person to that wide-eyed Ryan politeness.
Bill Maher expressed it this way, "9-1-1? There's an old man beating up a child on my TV."
Seems to me that in this regard as I watched Joe Biden call Ryan out, I was watching John Wayne go after the shyster capitalist rancher.
On Ryan's wide-eyed politeness...
Seems to me that from the first day of Obama's presidency the entire Republican party started a bar fight based on what Jon Stewart calls Bullshit Mountain ... and have kept it up ever since.
The recent Republican presidential nominating campaign was nothing less than a continuation of that bar fight with the most punches being thrown against a straw-man version of Obama that does not exist.
The moderator question last night about the negative campaigning toward the end of the debate was spot on and useful. The answers predictably were not much more than calmer versions of that very negativity.
Partisan weepers and professional pundits decry Biden's behavior against one of the poster boys for the straw-man bar fight with his obstructionist record in the House as an ideologue for the party of NO! ...
no constructive jobs proposals of their own and essentially - as Senator Mitch McConnell condensed the party attitude with his vow to limit Obama to a single term
"We got nothing and we ain't helping Obama!"
Stepping into that loudmouth bar fight is something spineless Dems should have been doing from day one.
In that regard, Ryan was right during the debate when he referred to those Dem party majorities in the early years.
Obama's sense of expected bi-partisan cooperation from Republicans and his party's willingness to go along, trust the process and assume Republican non-partisan cooperation in the interest of the public good turned out to be an idealistic pipe dream.
The bar fight should have been taken up in earnest from the get-go since a bar fight is all Dems got from Repubs.
It seems to me that the Dems could have accomplished much more with an aggressive response to that mad-dog barking that might have gotten Repub attention early on rather than encouraging the subsequent partisan blocking tactics ... and perhaps achieved more constructive results.
It also seems that the result has been Republican claim of innocence of any infraction and a pretense that nothing wrong was done.
The Dems are only being rude when they challenge the Repubs now.
We are now being told that Dems are not being polite.
Repubs are asking voting referees to see only the second infraction, not the first.
There’s an old line attributed to Bill Clinton: It’s hard for the other guy to talk when your fist is in his mouth.
I liked last night's debate.
It felt good, like watching John Wayne go after the ranch-stealer in
Rio LoboBiden finally knocked over the card table, backed the shyster into the corner and called him and his party out.
10:45 AM Update with which I agree from
William Rivers Pitt:Anyone who tells you the vice presidential debate was a tie, or that Mr. Ryan prevailed, is trying to sell you a diamond mine that ain't worth a dime. The ultimate impact and import of what went down during Thursday's debate won't be immediately known, but the simple fact is beyond dispute: Joe Biden owned the night, and owned his opponent, in a way rarely seen in modern debate history.
