Debate #2 Go......Follow

I gotta give Ryan credit for pressing that "experience" angle as hard as possible. It'll probably work out quite well for people that have zero understanding of how the business experience is as useful to federal budgets as first-person-shooter experience is useful to SWAT snipers.

How about my medic time in Team Fortress 2?

That blonde ***** was far too ugly to be a Republican blonde lady. She's obviously part of the liberal hag squad.

Step 1: Tax cuts for everyone!
Step 2: More wars!
Step 3: magic, fairy dust and unicorns
Step 4: ???
Step 5: Profit!

I am more of a Step 4 kinda guy

That's good because those will be needed to fund all of their grand ideas.

"My fellow Americans, vote for me or I'll shoot my opponent."

Depending on the opponent, that may not get people to vote for you.

It's a win-win situation though.

If you vote for him, he wins because he gets voted in.
If you don't vote for him, he wins because his opponent is dead.

Pretend there was a thirty minute speech before it about being a war vet, and it'll look like playful ptsd.

Well this was a lot more exciting than the first debate.

Some of my favorite moments, strictly from the showmanship perspective, rather than policy points:
1) Biden's car crash turn-around (Saw that one coming. Who told Ryan to bring up that story?)
2) Biden comparing Ryan to Sarah Palin
3) Hammering on the 47%
4) The letters from Ryan requesting stimulus funds


What I learned from Ryan:

• The jobs numbers are going in the wrong direction. (Apparently job growth is the wrong direction? Jobs are going in the right direction you idiot, just not as fast as you want. Learn some calculus you supposed fucking economy wonk: when the derivative equals zero, then you're starting to go in the wrong direction.)

• We'll handle Iran better, but we don't know how. (Be "tougher" I guess? But they can't go to war, so as always, the options are sanctions and war; sanctions are slow and they don't feel powerful, but that's how it goes in the 21st century when you can't just go and bomb the fuck out of your enemies at will).

• We'll handle Afghanistan better, well kinda the same, but giving a set withdrawal date is bad, that much we know.

• We'll handle Syria better, but we don't know how. (Dealing with revolutions in foreign countries involves a lot of really nuanced issues and isn't really a left-vs-right philosophical issue. There's no one solution that is always the best, and the results are almost always mixed. But of course, Obama is doing it wrong no matter what.)

• We'll find magic loopholes in the tax code. Cutting mortgate interest deduction for the wealthiest people will pay for everything.

• Republicans hate welfare except for SS and Medicare, those are awesome.

• Ryan apparently thinks "Obamacare" is an actual health care program, not a piece of legislation containing many different laws.

I was hoping he'd bring up that computer virus thing when Ryan was harping on Iran's nuclear threat, but I indeed forgot that of course that will remain classified until like 2040.

I'm surprised neither of them brought up North Korea as an analog. They have a nuclear bomb but it kinda sucks, and like Iran they have no missile capable of delivering it internationally. And they developed it even with trade sanctions in place, which is a point Ryan could have made. But the country is also impoverished and malnourished, which is bad from a humanist standpoint, but which also can't go on forever and they'll have to relent eventually.

Just to add a point where I think Biden didn't do well:
He correctly argued that the administration's statements regarding the Benghazi attacks developed as the intelligence was gathered. But his repeated use of the language "that's what they told us" comes off poorly, like "you can't blame us, we just did what we were told."