#Republicans’ wetdream: Fact Free Debates!
BTW: What’s the over/under on Hair Furor losing it and blurting out the “C” or “B” word tonight? ___ Gotta’ be a close one.
Other words to look for:
“Mexicans”
“foreigners”
“yuuuuuge”
“Muslim,”
“terrorists”
“loser”
“immigrants”
“sad”
“bigly”
“weak”
“tremendous”
“I”
“wall”
Feel free to add any you’re certain about.
Short of using racial slurs, the “C” word and shitting his pants and puddling on the floor, the media will be grading Trump on the “can stand behind a podium and convert oxygen to CO2” scale as his bar for success.
Final assessment by the MSM: “Hillary was right on questions of policy, the facts, and being able to speak coherently, just brilliant, but Donald was just so entertaining and, although he has nothing of substance to offer, a real crowd pleaser. He wins!”
If the voters elect that asshole for POTUS, this republic deserves whatever happens.
…thugs, wall, criminals, BLM, protests/protesters, wall, “religion of peace” (said sarcastically of course), vetting, wall, shootings, terrorism, “radical Islam,” wall, tax returns, health, riots, wall…
Well done! 
It may be time to end these Presidential ‘debates’.
They seem to be becoming as ridiculous as the ‘news’ channels and many ‘newspapers’, fact-free shouting matches.
That this entire pundit-created fact-check canard stems from one off-hand Candy Crowley remark about what then was recent news but recent news that had been captured and reworked into a falsehood, to the ultimate detriment of their candidate, by rightist members of that very same pundit class.
What the Trumpanzees are really saying, as everyone really knows deep down, is don’t call our BS what it is until later when it can be properly spun, or let us have our cake and eat it too…a familiar refrain.
Let’s be clear about something that I think a lot of people have lost sight of in this “discussion”.
Candy Crowley did not fact check Romney when he first made his lie about Obama not calling the Benghazi attacks terrorism. She stayed silent and let Obama address it, and then Romney doubled down and attempted to make it a “he said/he said” stand off.
It was perfectly appropriate for Crowley to step in and that point and break the “impasse”. Romney’s come back was essentially looking to the moderator to make a call. And she did.
This is completely in keeping with “facilitating” fact checking between the candidates as Brown is indicating.
My expectations are that Trump will use his version of the Gish Gallop, many times, tonight. There is simply no way that Holt, or any moderator, can keep up with that, and if they even tried, the debate would be 90 minutes of back and forth between Trump and Holt. We certainly don’t want that.
The task for the networks is not about fact checking him real time in the debates, but in fact checking him AFTER the debate in the various spin zones/rehashes of the debate.
Hillary is going to have to have a plan for dealing with the Gallop, probably by asserting actual facts during the debate and ensuring her team is on the ball in the immediate follow up to list and point out each of his lies while promoting her factual based answers.
Her real challenge, IMO, is to present herself as the strong, capable, compassionate leader with a positive vision for our future. Let Trump take the role of saying “that’s not true” and be forced to be the one to appeal to the moderator to “facilitate” the fact checking…because he will lose that and create many epic “Romney/Crowely” moments in the process.
So she almost has to ignore Trump to a point, and certainly don’t drop down to his level to take his bait. She needs it to be a “Compare and Contrast” night, not a “Who got in the best zinger” night. This will become easier for her to accomplish in the Town Hall meeting (she does extremely well in those settings, IMO, as she relates to each person asking in a personal manner. Trump, OTH, has disdain for the common folk, unless they are telling him how great he is). But tonight, she needs to start laying down the paint for that picture to really start coming into focus by the 2nd debate.
The odds go up a lot more in the 3rd debate, IMO.
A moderator can always fact check in effect, without doing it officially, simply with good questioning.
Trump may be setting himself up for a fail. Suppose he repeats the lie that unemployment is 42% 10 times in the debate. He will get murdered in the media tomorrow. If he takes the debate format as a license to say ANYTHING, he could easily go crazy.
Exactly. Here’s the rope. Run with it or stay here and chat.
Schrödinger’s cat has tried to take in all the pre debate chatter and assessments and, in anticipation of the results, has just entered a wormhole. Well, it’s a string theory! ~rimshot!~
Schrödinger’s cat relish…mmmm.
I’m expecting something along the lines of an analysis that says “Trump won because he proved he could stand in there with a master of policy and at least hold his own and still appear presidential.” It will be totally based on the idea that he does have a lower bar, that’s it’s totally ok for him to have a lower bar, that he wins by being capable of standing on stage, spouting whatever substanceless counter-policy talking points he’s been told to memorize (and which nobody will check in real time), retaining the appearance of composure and thereby borrowing from Clinton’s stature by managing to “hold his own” in comparison.
So yeah, to add to the list…although you’ll be hearing it from the bobbleheads, not the candidates…“presidential.” You’re gonna hear that one all night. One can only hope that I’m wrong and you’ll only be hearing about it in the context of him having a meltdown, but you’ll be hearing it either way. Have a puke bucket ready in case he doesn’t have a meltdown and you have to endure it being used about him just because he manages to skate by.
This is a MASSIVE advantage to Trump, who can now lie brazenly and repeatedly without any fear at all of pushback. Clinton will have to spend so much time correcting Trump’s bullshit that she won’t have any time to make her own points.
This is the final capitulation of the media and the supposed protectors of civic democracy. So much for the notion that the media are finally coming to their senses.
Janet Brown is not only a fucking moron, she’s an abject coward who’s openly prostituting the debates in favor of Trump and the GOP.
Of course not!
Networks (gop/bag stenographers) aren’t known for telling the truth or actual facts for that matter. They can’t spot a lie coming from the orange pie hole …but, we can.
Every 3 minutes!
Precisely. And, using that example, Hillary shouldn’t say “That’s simply not true Donald, the unemployment rate is 4.9%”, rather, she should ignore his lie and say “The unemployment rate is 4.9%, but we need to do better for those who aren’t tracked in that number, and here is my plan to do so. By increasing infrastructure spending in the first 100 days, by raising the minimum wage to $15, and by expanding green energy jobs…jobs that are right here in America and not overseas making ties for my opponent”
Let him be the one to say “No, its 42% unemployment!!” and turn to Holt to settle the dispute. He loses that. He loses the factual argument, but more importantly, he looks petty and weak in the process, and has offered up no specific plan or positive vision for the future.
And remember, the longer he tries to stay on any given topic, like say unemployment, the more time he is giving Hillary to respond, which she will use to lay down even more of her ACTUAL plans for a positive future.
If only there was some distributed, highly available network of information they could access to fact-check the candidates. Sigh.
James Fallows had a lengthy but dead-on article on this a couple of weeks ago, and you could summarize it just as you do here by saying it’s essentially a chance to see these two people and decide who’d be a better President. You can see who’s “winning” with the sound off, Fallows says. For what it’s worth I think Hillary is more likely to master herself, relax, and let her conviction that she’s right for the job work for her. Trump has to prove he’s not an erratic, ignorant, unstable crazy person. He’s playing against type. He might pull it off, like Reagan did, but I think Reagan’s odds were better. In a few hours we’ll know, at any rate.
Being this entire election so far has been 100% fact-free, I imagine this will work out great for the historically biggest liar Trump, and continue to work out poorly for the candidate consistently shown to be the most truthful, Hillary Clinton.
I wouldn’t be too concerned. We live in an age where everyone has access to correct information and we have an extraordinarily enlightened, informed, and well-read electorate. Everything will work out for the best.
Just kidding. We’re totally screwed.