td11 wrote:

[Reveal] Spoiler:

jh u welcome

jerseyhoya wrote:

Monkeyboy wrote:Just out of curiosity, JH, how can you support someone who so clearly lied his ass off this last debate? How do you know what his policies really are and whether or not you support them? And certainly, how can you trust him? The fact that he lied his ass off while changing many/most of his major positions would make me really not want to vote for the guy. I know I wouldn't vote for a dem that was so transparently full of crap. I'd stay home.

Here's an AP look at various inaccurate claims made by Romney and Obama in the debate. Neither were without sin, and both seemed to get about the same number of things wrong, although I think Obama was more misleading about bigger things.

Phan In Phlorida wrote:

dajafi wrote:To be clear, I myself don't think he would govern as a pragmatist, because to the modern deranged right pragmatism is apostasy. I've read a lot about Romney the last month or so in particular (and I guess the last six years or so in general--I would particularly recommend Nick Lemann's long New Yorker profile and the Benjamin Wallace-Wells piece in New York magazine about Romney's experiences as Mormon stake president in Boston), and the thru-line is the guy's utter willingness to say and do what he must to win. As we saw last week, he's really good at this... which I have to admit isn't a bad trait in a leader.

I think if he has a default setting with respect to policy, it's probably more like the guy from the debate and his MA governorship. But he won't fight within his own crazy-ass party to be that guy. And they're so desperate for victory that they won't kick at his pretending to be that guy in order to win.

jerseyhoya wrote:Andrew Sullivan is such a clown

The. Worst.

jerseyhoya wrote:Andrew Sullivan is such a clown

The. Worst.

"I also don’t think he won by lying," wrote Ezra Klein of the Washington Post. "He mostly danced around the ambiguities in his policies in a way that appeared to confound Obama."

dajafi wrote:I know this is both impossible and meaningless, but I'd be interested in what someone who just read a transcript thought of the debate. It's not like Romney either provided details of his plans or convincingly rebutted Obama's pushback on substance--as the fact checkers and other observers have noted. But obviously he gave a much better performance, which most people will respond to more than the substance.

On the tax plan, he can't make those numbers work, and past experience suggests he'll just further explode the deficit like every other Republican. But Obama totally failed to make this fairly easy argument in the room/on-camera. I suspect Biden will do better on Thursday against the even more arithmetic-challenged Ryan, though I'm not sure it'll matter very much.

dajafi wrote:I know this is both impossible and meaningless, but I'd be interested in what someone who just read a transcript thought of the debate. It's not like Romney either provided details of his plans or convincingly rebutted Obama's pushback on substance--as the fact checkers and other observers have noted. But obviously he gave a much better performance, which most people will respond to more than the substance.