During Thursday night's debate, Vice President Joe Biden called out Paul Ryan for his inaccurate statements regarding embassy security and other matters—characterizing them as "a bunch of malarkey"—then followed up by pointing out Ryan's cutting of the budget for embassy security by $300 million. And moments later Biden addressed Ryan's farcical claim to knowledge of the ayatollahs' views regarding the Obama administration's credibility, calling this "a bunch of stuff" and "malarkey."
This is what has to happen. As Paul Krugman had pointed out the Sunday following the first presidential debate, the press can't "handle flat-out untruths". This isn't news, of course, to progressives and liberals, who have been bemoaning this failure for years now.
Here are excerpts from just a few of the articles covering Thursday's vice presidential debate:
Charles Pierce slammed Paul Ryan in "VP Debate 2012: The Real Paul Ryan Is Bad for America":
There is a deeply held Beltway myth of Paul Ryan, Man of Big Ideas, and it dies hard. But, if there is a just god in the universe, on Thursday night, it died a bloody death, was hurled into a pit, doused with quicklime, buried without ceremony, and the ground above it salted and strewn with garlic so that it never rises again. On foreign policy, Ryan occasionally rose, gasping, to the level of obvious neophyte. [snip] On domestic policy, his alleged wheelhouse, he was vague, untruthful, and he walked right into a haymaker he should have seen coming from a mile off, when he started bloviating about Biden's role in the "failed" stimulus program, only to have Biden slap him around with Ryan's own requests for stimulus money for his home district back in Wisconsin. [snip]
Moreover, the battering that Biden gave Ryan brought something into sharp relief that the Republican party has been fudging ever since Romney put the zombie-eyed granny-starver on the ticket — that, for his entire political career up to that point, on critical economic issues, Paul Ryan was an extremist even by the standards of the modern Republican party, which are considerably high indeed. [snip]
You know what's the difference between Sarah Palin and Paul Ryan?
Lipstick.
In
"The Vice Presidential Debate: Joe Biden Was Right to Laugh," Matt Taibbi defends Joe Biden's conduct during the debate:
The Romney/Ryan ticket decided, with incredible cynicism, that that they were going to promise this massive tax break, not explain how to pay for it, and then just hang on until election day, knowing that most of the political press would let it skate, or at least not take a dump all over it when explaining it to the public. Unchallenged, and treated in print and on the air as though it were the same thing as a real plan, a 20 percent tax cut sounds pretty good to most Americans. Hell, it sounds good to me.
The proper way to report such a tactic is to bring to your coverage exactly the feeling that Biden brought to the debate last night: contempt and amazement. We in the press should be offended by what Romney and Ryan are doing – we should take professional offense that any politician would try to whisk such a gigantic lie past us to our audiences, and we should take patriotic offense that anyone is trying to seize the White House using such transparently childish and dishonest tactics.
"How Joe Biden Broke The Gish Gallop":
Biden clearly made the decision that he was going to impede Ryan’s ability to lie confidently. Ryan went at the vice president with distortions on every issue from Iran to abortion. And Biden refused to let any go. He used his facial reactions and interjections to contest the lies, demanded his equal time and tied it all together with his somewhat mocking, Senatorial use of “my friend.” What was key to his strategy is that he actually spent little of his time rebutting facts. Instead he quickly bridged to his own arguments.
And here's the NYT editorial "The ‘Moderate Mitt’ Myth":
That’s what is disingenuous about the “Moderate Mitt” in recent speeches and the first presidential debate. He hasn’t abandoned or flip-flopped from the severe positions that won him the Republican nomination; they remain at the core of his campaign, on his Web site and in his position papers, and they occasionally slip out in unguarded moments. All he’s doing is slapping whitewash on his platform. The immoderation of his policies, used to win favor with a hard-right party, cannot be disguised.
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Link to the transcript of the vice presidential debate.