I left the room for a while during last night’s VP debate because it felt like a stream of psychological abuse. Much like Trump, Vance implied to me something like this: “I can say anything and nobody can make me regret it. I can lie, I can throw a cloud of distractions over the conversation, and you can’t call me on it, you can’t stop me. This is how the game is played in America and I’m pretty good at playing this game.”#
That felt like a stream of abuse to me, and I needed to take a break. Happily, some people are getting better at calling out what needs to be called out. It’s about time. #
Some things candidates say actually are damning, as Governor Walz noted. More points like that, please, you journalists and politicians. Otherwise, the manipulation, the psychological abuse, continues.#
Vance behaved as if this was a gotcha moment. He called out the journalist for fact checking when the rules of the debate said that they wouldn’t be doing that sort of fact checking.#
A less corrupt and dishonest politician would have noticed that the gotcha moment was actually when the journalist pointed out his intentional deception about large numbers of legal residents of Springfield, Ohio.#
Called out? No problem, he had a cloud of jargony details to cloak the issue in, all ready to go. He may not have Trump’s (for some audiences) magnetism, but he lies much prettier than Trump lies.#
I left the room for a while during last night’s VP debate because it felt like a stream of psychological abuse. Much like Trump, Vance implied to me something like this: “I can say anything and nobody can make me regret it. I can lie, I can throw a cloud of distractions over the conversation, and you can’t call me on it, you can’t stop me. This is how the game is played in America and I’m pretty good at playing this game.”#
That felt like a stream of abuse to me, and I needed to take a break. Happily, some people are getting better at calling out what needs to be called out. It’s about time. #
Some things candidates say actually are damning, as Governor Walz noted. More points like that, please, you journalists and politicians. Otherwise, the manipulation, the psychological abuse, continues.#
Vance behaved as if this was a gotcha moment. He called out the journalist for fact checking when the rules of the debate said that they wouldn’t be doing that sort of fact checking.#
A less corrupt and dishonest politician would have noticed that the gotcha moment was actually when the journalist pointed out his intentional deception about large numbers of legal residents of Springfield, Ohio.#
Called out? No problem, he had a cloud of jargony details to cloak the issue in, all ready to go. He may not have Trump’s (for some audiences) magnetism, but he lies much prettier than Trump lies.#