10 Thoughts — Joe Biden – Paul Ryan Round-Up
From Joe Patrice, a "national championship winning college debate coach and former president of the national sanctioning body for college debate", who the Balloon Juice blog got to liveblog the debate.
1st things first: Blog illustration is courtesy of EarlG!
1) Benghazi is a permanent draw: Paul Ryan did a fantastic job on the first question. Biden dodged the Benghazi issue and tried to pivot to better issues like pulling out of Iraq and killing bin Laden. Ryan stayed focused and brought it back to the attacks. Then Biden went after Ryan for voting against heightened State Department security and said their PR foibles were just a reflection of contemporaneous intelligence. Now, the Romney-Ryan ticket is stuck. They have the upper hand on facts, but to say that involves both a security failure and not trusting military and intelligence experts undermines waaayyy too many other arguments that both Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan want to make.
2) Debate nerd talk real quick: Ryan hyped up an Iran brink so much that it swamped his solvency. In other words, he explained that Iran will have a nuclear weapon by March 2013. When Martha pointed asked Ryan how they would solve this between January 2013 and March 2013 we had to watch him say: well, maybe we couldnt solve Iran in the 2 months I said it would take for Iran to get a nuke, but In the words of Rick Perry, Oops.
3) Paul Ryan wants to pull out of Afghanistan someday: Oh Jeez. Ryan says he wants to pull out in 2014 but not tell anyone. Does he want us to pull out in the middle of the night like the Baltimore Colts?
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http://recessappointment.com/2012/10/12/10-thoughts-joe-biden-paul-ryan-round-up/
And in the bonuses, he thinks Ryan looked so bad, that, given his refusal to debate Rob Zerban, this really hurts Ryan for his House seat.
CrispyQ
(36,487 posts)I hope that little punk loses his Congressional seat, too.
Fuckin' A.
on edit: http://www.robzerban.com/
Stargazer09
(2,132 posts)I love a good debate, with a strong moderator.
And I especially love knowing that Ryan's political career may be cut short, now that the country is seeing him as he really is, a punk with a mission to cut all of our country's safety nets.
Good luck to Rob Zerban!
bemildred
(90,061 posts)A few additional thoughts:
4. & 9.) I hope Biden's command of the facts and will to use them puts to rest the notion that he is a dumb guy. He is not Einstein, but he is well up there in our current political class.
5.) One of the Pubbies greatest weaknesses is dogmatism. We should look for more opportunities to exploit that.
6.) I suspect that at first Biden was specifically not being solemn and professorial, like Obama was.
7.) Rmoney, in the first debate, would have lied outright, given that guarantee. So I give Ryan credit for having a scruple there, and Biden for knowing his man.
I liked Ms Raddatz too.