WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2024
Perhaps with a ban such as this: As we noted this morning, Candidate Vance still doesn't seem to know who won the last election.
This puzzling fact came to light during last evening's debate. Also, the candidate has been widely criticized for having made the highlighted statement in response to a question by Norah O'Donnell:
O'DONNELL (10/1/24): In the past, you have supported a federal ban on abortion after 15 weeks. In fact, you said if someone can't support legislation like that, quote, "You are making the United States the most barbaric pro-abortion regime anywhere in the entire world."
My question is, why have you changed your position?
VANCE: Well, Norah, first of all, I never supported a national ban. ...
The candidate continued at length from there. Especially within Blue America, he has been savaged for saying that he never supported a federal / national ban.
Why did Vance issue such a denial? O'Donnell didn't challenge his denial—but if she had, what would Vance have said?
We can't answer that question. Nor are we experts on the full roster of Vance's past statements on this topic. We can riddle you this:
When is a federal or national ban on abortion not a federal or national ban on abortion? Possibly, when it's a federal or national ban on abortion "after fifteen weeks."
As Blue pundits frequently note, the vast majority of abortions take place within the first fifteen weeks. Our question:
If someone proposes a ban on abortions after that, has that person actually proposed "a ban on abortions," full stop?
Has that person proposed "a ban on abortions?" We'd be inclined to say no, with clarifications to follow.
Is that what Vance would have said if his denial had been challenged? We don't have the slightest idea!
In our view, the moderators behaved like potted plants during most of the evening, probably due to the agreement by CBS News that they wouldn't perform any fact-checking. Perhaps for that reason, O'Donnell never went back and questioned what Vance said.
What did Candidate Vance mean by the denial in question? We don't have any way to know. If O'Donnell had followed up, we'd all be able to evaluate what the candidate said.
In his list of fact checks for the Washington Post, Glenn Kessler scores Vance "disingenuous" for this particular statement. In this instance, we think Kessler may have gotten a bit out over his skis.
For the record, Kessler lists many other plain misstatements by Vance. Also for the record, we humans don't reason with spectacular clarity, especially at highly polarized times such as these.
At times like these, we humans tend to want what we want! As the great anthropologist Gene Brabender once observed:
Where I come from, we only talk so long. After that, we start to hit.
JD Vance said in 2022 he ‘would like abortion to be illegal nationally’
ReplyDeletehttps://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2024/07/17/politics/kfile-jd-vance-abortion-comment
Re: 320,000 "missing" children
ReplyDeleteI read elsewhere that The Man Who Shouts was bruiting a similar claim last night, but he was saying hundreds of thousands of women are missing.
Anyone have a clue what he was talking about?
Gene Brabender was not an anthropologist. He was a baseball player. His quote (taken out of context) may be referring to hitting baseballs with bats, not to any kind of violence occurring after words fail. Somerby doesn't explain anything any more and much of what he says is misleading or confusing. I suspect he writes this stuff by rote, to fill up space, but I have no idea why he feels he needs to do that.
ReplyDeleteI have received an error message saying that I have created the maximum number of comments for today. Given that there are only two comments to this post, that is somewhat confusing.
When you institute a ban on abortion past 15 weeks, you do not guarantee the right to abortion before 15 weeks. States can ban abortion before that cutoff or entirely and be consistent with a national ban past 15 weeks. Haggling about 15 weeks makes no sense under such circumstances. It also makes it unnecessary to ask Vance what he meant. Trump said 6 weeks was too short, which is an affirmation of a right to abortion to past 6 weeks. He was being vague about how long women should have to decide, not wishing to alienate anti-abortion voters or pin himself down. It is unclear to me why Somerby is writing about this, except to criticize the moderators, who are the true criminals in this election cycle. Crickets on Vance's shouting until they turned his mic off.
ReplyDeleteKessler is behind a pay wall.
ReplyDeleteThe brief filed by Jack Smith in his trial against Donald Trump has just been made public. It contains new factual info about his activities on 1/6. You can read it here:
ReplyDeletehttps://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.258148/gov.uscourts.dcd.258148.252.0.pdf