Patterico's Pontifications

9/24/2024

Constitutional Vanguard: On Saying What You Actually Believe, Even If Your Tribe Dislikes It

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 7:59 am



My latest discusses Liz Cheney’s endorsements of Kamala Harris and Ted Cruz’s opponent, and takes on those who criticize either or both. I discuss why she does not hyperfocus on her policy differences with Harris, and why she would endorse a Democrat for the U.S. Senate. I think the reasons are obvious. Sample:

She goes on to say, later in the interview:

[T]he Republicans have nominated somebody who – who, you know, is depraved. Somebody who shows us every day that—that, you know, he has tendencies and he’s willing to embrace things that are fundamentally a danger to—to this nation and to our Constitution. So, the choice, in my view, is not a close one.

Like me, Cheney places a lesser importance on mundane political policy issues like tax rates, and a greater importance on issues like: whether the person holding office was actually the person elected by the American people; or whether one candidate is a Putin-loving ignoramus who makes up a huge percentage of the things he says. (More about that below, in the section for paid subscribers.) The question is not about Harris or how well (or poorly) thought out Harris’s policies are. The point is that Trump is 50,000 times worse, in every way.

For paid subscribers, I discuss the issue of the fairness of the ABC moderators, and offer a different perspective: instead of focusing on who got fact-checked more, why not ask: who was allowed to tell more lies without any pushback? By that metric, the moderators were very unfair . . . to Harris.

Look again at the list of lies mentioned by Dale that I chose to reproduce here. The ones about the economy, and preparations for January 6, and tariffs, and so forth. Include the fabrications from his piece about a dozen recent Trump fabrications told over the past month that were repeated at the debate: stuff like Trump’s claim that Biden sent Harris sent to negotiate with Putin before the Ukraine war; or that Harris was the first candidate to drop out in the 2020 primary; or that everybody (including all legal scholars!) wanted Roe overturned.

One thing that they all have in common is that the ABC moderators never said a word about any of them. Unless you happened to watch Daniel Dale’s fact-check or read a fact-check online, you heard those things asserted at the debate and never heard a correction.

(Let a thousand ad hominems against Daniel Dale bloom.)

Read it here. Subscribe here.


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