Thursday, June 27, 2019

Editor's Note: Debate night part 2 and reaction to part 1

Elizabeth Warren and Corey Booker react to Robert Francis O'Rourke. MSNBC.

Once again the Democratic candidates are going to debate and once again I am going to live tweet through at least most of it. Last night was tough to get through as the candidates were all spouting things I completely disagree with. Tonight I plan on live tweeting again and you can find my Twitter account here and my Gab.Ai account here.

As for last night, it was a total disaster for pretty much everyone. NBC probably was the worst as they had massive technical problems, which was the only moment of humor in the whole night. Their moderation was mixed with the first group of three being less biased and horrible than Rachel Maddow and Chuck Todd. But you could tell that not only were they biased in favor of Elizabeth Warren they were also all in on identity politics.

One of the more frustrating things was all the candidates speaking in Spanish. I know that the debate was also broadcast on Telumundo and at least one of the candidates, Julian Casto, is Hispanic, but it was still annoying. Without speaking Spanish I had no idea what they were saying, which kind of defeats the purpose of listening to them.

I generally disliked all of the candidates. Tulsi Gabbard made the most sense as she is a foreign policy wonk and I agree with her non-interventionism, but other than that she's just as crazy as the rest supporting things like medicare for all and gun control. There was one moment where I did say out loud, "I agree with this", and that was when Elizabeth Warren said she would break up big tech companies. I mean, I didn't agree with her reasoning but I do think it would be better for the country if there was more competition.

There were some just insane moments, with the biggest being Julian Castro saying he supports abortion for transgender people. Given that bottom surgery and hormones make pregancy difficult to impossible for female to male patients and obviously male to female can never get pregnant, it was an insane statement that makes no sense unless you are signalling to people that you support LGBT's to the point that not even objective reality matters anymore.

As for winners and losers, I am not so sure. Robert Francis "Beto" (ugh) O'Rourke had a rough night with the other candidates beating him up quite a bit. He also got a lot of flak for his Hispanic pandering. He's a rich Irish dude, not Hispanic at all, and his speaking Spanish seems like a desperate plan to get attention from the Hispanic community. I predict that it doesn't work out for him.

Tulsi Gabbard had a good night, not so much for what she said but because she won most of the online polls and search engine searches. The media is, of course, blaming Reddit and 4chan for this but the truth of the matter is that Gabbard's anti-intervention policy is popular across the board. I think she's the one candidate that could give President Trump trouble, especially if the Iran situation blows up.

Julian Castro had a big night but mostly for bad reasons. The media doesn't like to mention the transgender abortion gaffe but my gut tells me that most people were searching him to make fun of him. Cory Booker dominated the talk time but didn't do too much with it and stupidly said that he hears gunfire in his neighborhood all the time. And Elizabeth Warren had a strong first half of the debate but faded in the second.

I do have to say that the current 2020 clown car is a lot worse than any of the five people that ran last time (with Bernie Sanders still being a question mark). I'm on record as saying I hate Hillary Clinton but in comparison with her 2016 run she was downright reasonable compared to what I heard last night. And there is no Jim Webb candidate this time around. There was very little in the way of pushback for the Democrat's most unpopular ideas. Tim Ryan, who also got destroyed by Tulsi Gabbard for claiming the Taliban did 9/11, sort of said that the Democrats ideas weren't popular in flyover country, but everything else I heard from him was pretty much party line identity politics and gun control.

Finally, I expect more of the same tonight. We do have the advantage of having some of the biggest names including Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders and frontrunner Joe Biden debating. We also have Andrew Yang with his Universal Basic Income idea and the ever reprehensible Eric "Nuke gun owners" Swalwell debating so there might be some more fireworks. Either way, I will again have to resist the urge to throw things at my TV and avoiding getting banned on Twitter.

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