Vice Presidential Debate

rgbact, when you or one of the other con­ser­v­a­tives point me to a con­ser­v­a­tive “fact checker”, I’ll at least go read the arti­cle and com­ment on one or two of their thoughts. At the min­i­mum, a con­ver­sa­tion can pro­ceed that way. You’re free not to, of course. But I find it inter­est­ing that con­ser­v­a­tives won’t even do that much.

It is true that I tend to ridicule con­ser­v­a­tive colum­nists. But point me toward some­one pur­port­ing to do fact check­ing, and I’ll be inter­ested to see how the con­ser­v­a­tive mind works, and I’ll do the cour­tesy of look­ing into it.

Mule,

I under­stand your point.

While it is true that topic drift is a way of life in an online dis­cus­sion (and there is no way to avoid it), that dif­fers from inten­tional deflec­tion. No one’s per­fect, and if I ever engage in deflec­tion, I don’t mind hav­ing that pointed out. I also don’t mind some­one reit­er­at­ing a point they wanted to make, but which got lost in a given shuf­fle. So let me encour­age you to stress what­ever points you make that seem to go unanswered.

As for con­text — yes, it mat­ters, and when a quote is inten­tion­ally removed from con­text in order to make it appear to say some­thing other than what it says, hon­esty requires look­ing at the whole. If you see a com­ment (from, for instance, Scott Brown, or any­one else) that some­one quotes in a way that warps the mean­ing, I encour­age you to do what you can to cor­rect the false presentation.

In the cur­rent con­ver­sa­tion, for instance, you are stress­ing the need to take the state­ments and argu­ments of each of us in the larger con­text of what it does to our online inter­ac­tions and con­ver­sa­tions. That’s a legit­i­mate and impor­tant point to make, and I acknowl­edge that you are cor­rect in mak­ing it. Sim­i­larly, the com­ments of any pub­lic fig­ure should also be taken in the full con­text they were intended — which is why when some­one is mis­quoted, then if I’m aware of the larger mean­ing, I tend to make a point out of it sim­i­lar to the point you are mak­ing now.

Get­ting back to the Veep debate, I think Biden did what the Democ­rats needed. He gave a strong and vig­or­ous defense of Demo­c­ra­tic prin­ci­ples, and pointed up the dis­hon­esty and shal­low­ness of the Romney/​Ryan ticket, with all his blue-​​collar middle-​​class man-​​on-​​the-​​street style. Ryan was clearly out­classed and overmatched.

I would expect Biden’s force­ful­ness and spirit to offend the right — and it did. He had pas­sion on his side as well as fact and logic and humor and his­tory. Par­tic­u­larly in the area of for­eign affairs, I almost felt sorry for how far Ryan was out of his depth — except that Ryan is try­ing to become the Vice Pres­i­dent of the United States. That makes me feel offended that a major party would nom­i­nate some­one so clearly unqual­i­fied for the posi­tion, and do it twice in a row.

So I won­der what sort of pair they’ll nom­i­nate in 2016 to con­tinue the trend — maybe a Santorum/​Pawlenty ticket?