Exactly. That’s why Biden couldn’t have done a better job. He simultaneously energized his audience while preventing the opponent from communicating with any audience. Brilliant performance.

expat:

Saddam successfully misled the experts on WMD. I do not fault GWB for his choice. Further, I say the WMD argument was not necessary to justify invading Iraq. I align with the camp that says, “the first Gulf War never ended, we just stopped paying attention.”

“Gaslighted”. Good point. I haven’t thought about it that way before.

“Sometimes I think it’s a sin
When I feel like I’m winnin’ when I’m losin’ again.”

Biden’s performance felt good to the base perhaps, but cost Obama/Biden votes among independents.

So what is everyone talking about in the conservative forums and around the water cooler these days? Talk about the issues is overwhelmed by the talk about the bizarre behavior of Joe Biden. Virtually no one talks about the differences between Biden and Ryan’s answers on Medicare, Social Security, Bengazi, Iran or anything else, because all that was overshadowed by Biden’s weird behavior.

The watershed event during the first Romney/Obama debate was that 70 million Americans were finally introduced to Mitt Romney. They had been told, over and over, that Romney was a fatally flawed candidate. That he was unlikeable and off-putting. That even Republicans didn’t like him much. That he cared about nothing except for himself and millionaires. That he was the bad candidate that the Republicans were stuck with. Then Romney came on at the debate, and people got a good, hard look at him and a good, hard listen to what he had to say, and all that battlefield preparation flew out the window, because in fact he was likeable, he did seem to care about other Americans. In short, he turned out to be a very credible and viable candidate, and the general public realization of this essentially dynamited the core Obama campaign message, which was:

You may not like Obama, but Romney is unacceptable.

The same thing was about to happen with the Biden/Ryan debate. America has been told since Ryan was selected that he is an ultra-right wing tea partier who is way outside the mainstream of thought. That he is a crazy, unacceptable candidate. In other words:

You may not like Biden, but Ryan is unacceptable.

What Biden did was essentially burn himself to the ground in exchange for so distracting people from Paul Ryan that they would fail to reach the same conclusion that they did in the first debate. Had Biden debated normally, respectfully allowed Ryan to make his points, people would have formed the opinion about Paul Ryan that they did about Mitt Romney — that he is rational, intelligent, cares about everyone, and is a credible, acceptable candidate for Vice President. What Biden was trying to do was spoil the Ryan rollout — to make sure that people didn’t get to see what he was really like, both by interrupting him continuously and by acting out and distracting from Ryan. His crazy laughs were carefully timed to take place when Ryan was starting to make a point that could do some political damage.

Based on the fact that so many people rated the debate as a draw, I think that it largely worked. It was a draw not because the two candidates made equally valid points, or expressed themselves equally well, or inspired equal confidence. It was a draw because people couldn’t make heads or tails about the candidates. They could not get a good feel for what Paul Ryan was like in the way people got a good feel for what Mitt Romney was like. Of course, it made Biden look like a complete idiot. However, Biden has spent his entire career looking like a buffoon, yet it never seems to hurt him. For some reason, he can do that and it doesn’t hurt him. Actually, if you watch, he got dead-serious in the last five or so minutes of the debate. First impressions are what people are supposed to remember, but in this case it was probably the last impression that people remembered, because it was the only time during the entire debate that Biden behaved in a comprehensible manner and acted like he was in a Vice Presidential debate.

The Obama campaign must be incredibly desperate to use this strategy. To use a sports analogy, they were deliberately taking a 10 yard penalty in order to avoid an interception run back for a touchdown. I think that their strategy has been to try and run the clock out — to keep the election as uninteresting and undramatic as possible, while leaning on the polling organizations to keep falsifying the polls. If they could go into election day with the polls showing the race as a 50-50 tossup, with little voter enthusiasm, that would give them a lot of options to squeak by, or quietly steal the election out from under the electorate. That strategy is rapidly collapsing — people are starting to realize that Romney is running away with a landslide.

I’m so sick and tired of being gaslighted by these people and I suspect that a growing percentage of Americans are starting to feel the same. The Obama era can’t be over soon enough.

meantime, back in the plot, AP has a report out from “unnamed source” at State Dept that the WH version is not and never was the State Dept version. Oh, this is truly like a Greek tragedy. Hillary and Bill are playing their cards so close to the vest and have been for four years. talk about Chess – ha. This is life. And Karma rules. here’s the AP http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2215431/Death-U-S-ambassador-Chris-Stevens-revealed-AK-47s-grenade-attacks-smoke-filled-safe-room.html?ITO=1490 you have to scroll way down to the bottom for the Vid, but lots of info – or intrigue – along the way.

If this is what’s going on, then Biden’s wig-out and BO’s Big Bird jokes are just their personal versions of how they freak out when caught: one weird and the other in the denial of ego-control.

But in fairness this has become a tactic each side uses all too often. No one is allowed to have a different opinion, or to interpret facts differently, or to think that one set of facts is more important than another. All disagreements are portrayed as “lies.” It’s gotten to the point where I wonder if people even know what the word means.