- The most publicized statement during the debate that has been described as horrifying by conservative pundits was this one, by Joe Biden, after he was asked, “As president, would you be willing to sacrifice some of that growth, even knowing potentially that it could displace thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of blue-collar workers, in the interest of transitioning to that greener economy?'”
Biden answered immediately, “The answer is yes.”
“Displace,” of course, is a euphemism for “put out of work.” The relative nonchalance with which Biden, who is supposed to be the practical, sensible candidate, immediately said he was willing to disrupt hundreds of thousands of middle class lives in order to “transition” to “that greener economy,” whatever that means, reveals Biden as a first-rate panderer. He has also endorsed the ridiculous “Green New Deal,” which also means nothing.
- The climate chance section of the debate was an ethics trap for several of the candidates. Amy Klobuchar, who was generally praised for her performance, said,
“And the problem right now is that this climate change is an existential crisis. And you are seeing it here in California with the fires that you just had. You saw it in Northern California, as was mentioned with Paradise. And the most moving video from that to me was the 30-second video of that dad driving his little girl through the lapping fires with his neighborhood burning behind him and singing to her to calm her down.”
Every time one of the candidates uses doomsday rhetoric regarding climate change, he or she is laying the foundation for government control, and totalitarian measures. Rep. Octavio-Cortez’s political Svengali admitted as much, and had to be fired for his candor. A candidate who says climate change is an existential crisis and then follows that hysterical assessment with stating that the California wildfires are proof has told us that she doesn’t know what she’s talking about, but is pretending she does. Then she pivots to a single “moving” video, as if it proves anything at all. Message: I’m talking to emotion-driven ignoramuses now. I’m betting there’s enough of them.
Then Amy kow-towed to the Green New Deal too, endorsing draconian regulations, including the mind0blowingly expensive “upgrading” of existing buildings. I did like the transcript’s typo that quoted her as wanting to build a “fridge to the next century.” Now there’s a solution for global warming. But I’m pretty sure she said “bridge.”
Then Tom Steyer picked up on Amy’s “existential” scare-mongering and took it to the next step: he wants to “declare a state of emergency on day one” of his Presidency. That means giving the President wartime powers to circumvent individual rights and the Constitution, until “the emergency” is over.
Wouldn’t you think that someone, a moderator maybe, would ask for clarification of what “declaring an emergency” means in practical terms? Yet nobody did. Steyer also said, right after he explained that he would shut down fossil fuels, that this would the create literally millions of middle-class union jobs, well-paid, across the United States of America. Was he demented, deluded, or lying?
Pete Buttigeig also implied that government coercion is a big part of his climate change “solution.”:
And that is why I want to make sure that our vision for climate includes people from the autoworker down the block from me in South Bend to a farmer a few minutes away so that they understand that we are asking, recruiting them to be part of the solution, not beating them over the head and telling them they’re part of the problem.
Wait, Pete, what does “recruitment” mean in this context?
- As repetitious as it is, I have to mention that the candidates opening salvo about about how bad Orange Man is was a collective low. I did learn something: “corrupt” is apparently an official Democratic talking point, like seeking “dirt” on Biden. Here’s Bernie Sanders:
We have a president who is running the most corrupt administration in the modern history of this country,
How, Bernie? Corrupt means taking bribes, pay-offs, criminal activity, and basing decisions affecting the country on bias and conflicts of interest. Sounds like the Democrats to me. Go ahead, tell us about emoluments.
and we have a president who is a fraud, because during his campaign, he told working people one thing, and he ended up doing something else.
I could be wrong, and Trump said a lot of things, some of them contradictory, but what I most remember is that he said he would fix the economy, create jobs, and up employment and wages. he appears to have done that.
I believe, and I will personally be doing this in the coming weeks and months, is making the case that we have a president ho has sold out the working families of this country,
This is another theme of the debate: the Democrats apparently exist in an alternate universe, where there is a recession on. It is, of course, Big Lie #5: “Everything is Terrible. I’m going to be very interested in seeing how long the Democrats persist in this Jumbo of an campaign claim: “Good economy? What good economy?” It seems to insult the intelligence of the public, and is very risky if voters, you know, are pay9ing attention, because it should become obvious that they are being lied to, and I would think that they would eventually resent it.
It also seems risky to engage in a such a substantial lie while saying that Trump should be impeached because he lies.
…who wants to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid after he promised he would not do that, and who has documentedly lied thousands of times since he is president.
Wait, did I miss Trump cutting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid? The President can’t do that without Congress: Bernie has to know that, right? Doesn’t he also know that wanting to do something can’t break a promise? And how does Bernie know what Trump “wants”?
…we cannot have a president with that temperament who is dishonoring the presidency of the United States.
You know, the Democrats insist that they have ground for impeachment, and then keep saying stuff like this (as do my friends in the Facebook Borg collective.) Temperament and “dishonoring” the Presidency are not impeachable offenses. The fact that they think Trump is unfit is irrelevant. The voters decide who’s fit.
BOY, I’m sick of writing that.
It looks like there’s going to have to be a Part III, but I can’t leave without commenting on this prime example of demagoguery from the Head Demagogue, Elizabeth Warren. Watch how she works the “magic word” (really, a duck should come down holding it like the “secret word” in Groucho’s “You Bet Your Life”)…
Here’s Liz:
But the way I see this is we’ve now seen the impact of corruption, and that’s what’s clearly on the stage in 2020, is how we are going to run against the most corrupt president in living history. You know, this president has made corruption originally his argument that he would drain the swamp, and, yet, he came to Washington, broke that promise, and has done everything he can for the wealthy and the well-connected, from tax breaks to ambassadorships. We have to prosecute the case against him, and that means we need a candidate for president who can draw the sharpest distinction between the corruption of the Trump administration and a Democrat who is willing to get out and fight not for the wealthy and well-connected but to fight for everyone else. That’s why I’m in this race.
I’m still unclear on this corruption thing. Every President gives ambassadorships to wealthy donors. Warren also is saying that only the wealthy are doing well during the Trump Presidency. That’s untrue, yet Warren raises this in the context of justifying impeachment.
But that’s what demagogues do.
It’s strange, isn’t it? Trump has raised the curtain on Biden’s corruption, the intelligence agencies’ corruption; the Democratic Party’s corruption, and the news media’s corruption, and the best Warren can come up with other than “he’s corrupt because we say so” is that donors get ambassadorships, and the wealthy are doing well.
Ethics Alarms 
Demagogues will be demagogues, but some of these demagogues are also U.S. Senators. The proper answer to the question of impeachment, for somebody bound by a constitutional duty to be a fair and impartial trier of that impeachment, is to reserve judgment until the cases for and against have been made in the Senate.
I have no problem at all with the Senators deciding, after observing the proceedings in the House, that the process was illegitimate and a political abuse of the Constitution, and, as a result, undeserving of anything but a perfunctory trial and dismissal. For Democrats to lecture about pre-determination after openly advocating impeachment for something, anything, from before Trump was even sword in to the present takes an astounding amount of gall. If the public doesn’t see this, they need to be made to.
Incidentally, I watched the whole Senate “trial,” and it was anything but. There was no serious consideration of the offenses; my old law prof. Chuck Ruff, defending Clinton, said “at the end of the day” a thousand times, and while the process involved formal presentation of the evidence, it was perfunctory, taking a month for a complicated case where an equivilent criminal case of approximate seriousness would have taken six or more. Dale Bumpers, the ex-Senator, gave a disgraceful closing argument that claimed that because Clinton’s perjury involved sexual conduct, it didn’t count, and that perjury in a court of law and lying to a grand jury didn’t constitute “a political crime against the state, essentially making up a limitation on impeachment that doesn’t exist…and a President defying the justice system for his own political survival IS a political crime against the state. It was literally a fake trial, with the result never in doubt.
I think the senate should hold a trial; a great, big, beautiful trial, the best trial ever, with the most wonderful witnesses.
Seriously though, could you imagine a Republican controlled counterpart to what the Democrats did in the house? Call whatever witnesses the Democrats want, and then call in Hunter Biden to discuss all his qualifications to handle Burisma. Call in Joe Biden to discuss why exactly he put all the weight of the presidency behind firing a single corrupt prosecutor in one of the most corrupt governments on Earth. Call in Adam Schiff to squirm as republicans blast him on all the layers of his dishonesty and abuse of process. Call in James Comey, and have him squirm while being blasted over the IG report. Give them all a chace to lie on the stand or plea the fifth, and watch their numbers tank or the arrests happen. The Democrats just spent an absolutely ungodly amount of money on a multi-year, multi-million dollar single use, undisclosed PR campaign, the Republicans wouldn’t even need to spend the cash, because we know enough about how deep the rabbit hole of Democrat corruption goes to last us well and until the 2020 election.
Which… Might be why Pelosi is holding onto the conviction. Cocaine Mitch would be *just* the guy to do it.
And, ask every witness, including Schiff, who the whistleblower is, holding all who refuse to answer in contempt.
-Jut
It is as if Democrats have problems with the precedents they set being used against them.
I think this, and the impeachment, are basically Kavanaugh all over again. Threaten to make a case, if threatening doesn’t work, demand everything be tilted your way before you make the case, if tilting doesn’t work, or if the other side won’t buy it, then inflate, if inflation doesn’t work, lie, if lying doesn’t work then resort to shutuppery, howdareyouism, and bludgeoning of the other side. If, after all that, you still can’t make the case, then complain the other side is corrupt, or the process is corrupt, or that those who don’t agree with you are barriers to progress that need to be removed. Given that the left counts women who scream at the sky and men who open up people’s heads with metal batons among its faithful, that still just might work.
I want to know if Tom Steyer will divest his entire portfolio of green investments before the DNC convention.
With all the ranting and raving about Trump’s taxes not one person has brought up the fact that if Steyer has the ability to direct regulation in the energy sphere he will self dealing by promoting green energy.
Good heavens, no. Why would Democrats require disclosure and divestment from their sacred cows? I mean, if Steyer wins, the Democrats can show that he understands green industry and how it works, making him the perfect leader to dismantle Big Pollution.
jvb
I personally loved the moment where Mayor Pete clocked Warren after she made the wine cave comment.
(paraphrasing, obviously)
Warren: “We shouldn’t allow billionaires to effect our election, blah blah blah, you had a fundraiser in a wine cave with $1000/bottle wine blah blah blah.”
Pete: “I’m the only person on this stage who isn’t at least a millionaire, would I be corrupted taking your money? This is the problem with assigning purity tests that you yourself cannot live up to, your campaign is financed through money you personally donated to it, but up until very recently, you were having the exact same kind of fundraisers that you’re kvetching about now, and that’s where your money came from.”
Warren has had this coming for months, she’d been pushing that narrative while rolling in donor dough, and Pete was ready for it. I’d still vote for a fire hydrant over either of them, but the moment was pure schadenfreude.
I watched a few minutes of this last debate, partly to atone for the corporeal punishment for my many sins, but I decided watching paint dry was more interesting. My take away was: I am tired of the fools scolding me for drinking their elixirs. I don’t want to buy the House on Green Tech Avenue so I want to dump toxic sludge in rivers, highways and byways of New Green Deal America. I am also tired of class warfare. I hope the Democrat party realizes that they are going to get slaughtered if they keep it up. Otherwise, four more years of Trump mania.
jvb
If it is suchn an existential crisis, then merely using green energy is not going to stop it.
Someone will have to blot out the sun, just like in the Animatrix short “Second Renaissance”.
Re the idiocy of the climate change comments. Examples. Wildfires are a natural phenomenon: the problem is that we continue to build in wildfire territory. It’s a “disaster” because people are stupid enough to build there. It has nothing, nothing to do with global warming or climate change. Similarly, every so often the Mississippi floods: onto what it well known as the “flood plain.” When homes built on the flood plain are destroyed, the Feds allow people to build there again and again and again. The flood plain is a natural geological fact. So, what we have are people who think that just because we can clean up places like Lake Erie, e.g., in the ’60s, we can control the natural processes of Earth. This is pure agit/prop: any natural disaster is our fault, and that means, to some morons and propagandizers that humans have complete control over Earth. Wrong. Earth is a living, changing entity, and it is the height of hubris to decide that we like Earth the way it is, or can make it what it should be, that we actually have that control. The data is NOT in: what is in is that scare-mongers use every single means to convince us that we can control Earth and it’s multi-billion year evolution as a planet.