Fact Checking the Debate

I had to give this one a few days. I watched most of the debate, but had to tune out after the umpteenth time the moderators interrupted the debate to say things that are just not true. All in all, it wasn’t so much a debate as a dog-pile on Trump. I thought Trump handled himself fairly well, but I was irritated that he let himself be baited by Harris. It was obvious what she was going to do, and she did it, and the fact that he fed right into it was painful.

The main topics were Jan. 6th, the economy, immigrants, war, unemployment, job rates, trade deficits, gun confiscation, and a few other things.

David Muir asked Trump if there was anything he regretted about January 6th. I thought it was a decently worded question, and open ended enough that Trump should have been able to find something to talk about. I’m sure that Trump has regrets that people turned into a mob (not a riot, no, but yes a mob), that a person lost their life, etc. Instead, he chose to talk about how he had nothing to do with it except to make a speech. While that’s factually true, it left opponents open to making all sorts of commentary and accusations.

Harris, for her part, was just ridiculous. She said, “On that day, 140 law enforcement officers were injured and some died, and understand the former president has been indicted and impeached for exactly that reason.” Sure, lots of people were injured, but the ones who died were not due to their injuries sustained at the Capitol (FactCheck.org). Her bullshit about Trump threatening a “bloodbath” is just ridiculous.

The fight over tariffs is beyond my paygrade. There’s a lot of information on it online, and I encourage people to go read it. Both Trump’s and Harris’s various economic plans will cost the country money. The question is how much, and when. Trump’s tariff plans seem to indicate that We The People will see a slight increase in prices initially, because tariffs always do that (increase a price to someone and they pass that along to the consumer), but the general expectation is that American producers will be able to compete, thereby making American goods cheaper to purchase. That takes time, though, so right now it looks bad. And honestly, it IS bad, but only in the short term. I don’t know that many of us can handle a short price hike while things sort themselves out.

Harris just seems to be wanting to give people money, which might seem “nice” on the outside but… where’s the money coming from? In a crap economy where the government is bleeding dollars down the drain, where are these grants for new housing and other monies coming from? I gather Harris is just planning on printing more, but we all know how that works out. NPR suggests that the pandemic messed with the economy world wide (NPR) and I believe that to be correct, but only sort of. People were better under Trump in general. NPR suggests that prices under Trump were “depressed” for some reason, without actually giving a reason, so that now that they’re “normal,” it seems like more. NPR also states that prices have risen about 21%, but salaries have risen about 23%, so it’s all about the same as before the pandemic. I don’t think they understand economics.

The biggest issue for Trump during the economics portion of the debate was his insistence on saying things like, “I created one of the greatest economies in the history of our country…” (AP News) and “The worst inflation we’ve ever had” [was under Biden] (BBC). Stuff like this simply never works out well for him, or Republicans in general. Was the country better, financially? Yes, absolutely. Has Biden/Harris messed things up completely? Definitely. Was Trump’s economy the best ever? Nope, not even close, but for very complex reasons including the pandemic. Was Biden’s the worst? No, it wasn’t. Every time Trump says something about being the greatest, or the only, or the best, it just tanks his chances. I wince Every Single Time.

So what else was said? Oh yes, the cats and dogs in Springfield Ohio. So I follow a bunch of people on TikTok because they’re interesting or fun or show cute animals. One of them is a particularly left leaning lady who’s a professional wildlife rehab person. That’s what she does for a living. Turns out she lives in Springfield. She has a bunch of videos of herself, grabbing various wild animals (NOT cats and dogs) out of the hands of dark skinned people who don’t speak English and who I assume are Haitian. Her statement is that prior to the Haitians’ arrival, her main job was to deal with animals who ingested poisoned vermin, occasional garbage incidents, that kind of thing. She wasn’t terribly busy, but always had something going on. Now, she can’t even walk her dog along the beach without running into scenes of these people killing wild animals. She doesn’t go into whether they’re eating them or practicing witchcraft with them (and honestly I don’t care either way), but she was getting upset. She tried reporting them, and not only was her report not taken, she was told flat out that it wasn’t happening. She was on the phone with these people while holding a goose she’d rescued from the group. I got nuthin’.

Now, the lady eating the cat, that was both real and not reported correctly. Turns out she’s quite American, born and bred in Ohio. She has a long history of mental health issues, including eating dead animals raw. She was indeed taken by the cops, that is a real video. They did actually ask her if she’d eaten the cat, and she did get pictures taken of her by the cops, with … well, with bits of cat in her teeth. But that was nothing to do with “eating pets” or sacrifices or anything other than a certifiably mentally ill person who’d escaped from where they should have been and was off their meds. So while the video is definitely real, the spin put on it is not. I have not, to date, seen any evidence that Haitians are eating pets. I have heard anecdotal evidence from people saying their pets were found dead under mysterious circumstances, but they don’t appear to have been eaten.

Immigration was definitely a hot topic. Again, Trump sunk himself by pulling numbers out of his ass. He really needs to study those numbers and use the real ones, or the extrapolated ones. By making claims of 21 million people a month streaming into the country, he just sets himself up to be laughed at. The most conservative of the Republicans seem to think the number rests at about 1.7 million a month. For the 2024 year, we currently sit at 1.4 million people apprehended for illegally crossing the border (as of September – BBC), and there have been about 10 million “encounters” with migrants since 2021. I can see those numbers being low, but that’s for a whole year, and just under three years, not per month. I would much rather have had him stand there and say, “1.4 million people, your stats say were apprehended, and how many came across without getting caught. Call it 3 million people for this year alone. That’s a travesty!” That would have been a good use of their own numbers, and no one could have “fact checked” him on it because he’d have used their own numbers. And frankly, 3 million people for this year is dismal.

The abortion ban thing was just stupid. It’s turned into a shouting match. “You said you’d ban abortion!” “No I didn’t!” The answer is, no he didn’t say he’d ban abortion. He said he’d consider laws that came to his desk referring to abortions post 20 weeks (ie medical viability). He said he was happy that abortion access went back to the states. He did say something about all legal scholars wanting Roe vs Wade rewritten, which was never going to fly. Again, and again and again, anytime he says “all” or “every” or makes grandiose statements, he gets dinged. Sure, the Right knows he’s just exaggerating… but the Left uses it, weaponizes it, and demonizes him for it. And it needs to fucking stop.

“They have abortion in the ninth month,” he said, before alluding to misconstrued comments by former Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam. “He said, the baby will be born and we will decide what to do with the baby. In other words, we’ll execute the baby.” (Trump initially misidentified him as the former governor of West Virginia.) — FactCheck.org

So the above is not correct for Virginia, and is definitely correct for several states (ten states currently do not put any limit on how late an abortion can be done: DC, Alaska, Colorado, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, and Vermont – Guttmacher). I have watched several videos of people calling places in those states, asking for 34 week abortions, and getting positive responses. Considering I live beside Vermont, I am considering doing such a call myself, just to see what they say. If I do, I will let you know the results of that call.

The Left will tell you that less than 1% of all abortions are in the third trimester. Without having good numbers and research involved, we can’t really know how many abortions happen in a year, though we often know more about later term abortions than earlier ones. Current research (Pew Research) states that the US sees less than a million abortions a year. I admit, I find that number hard to believe and consider it too low. Considering the fear mongering being engaged in by the Left, I consider that to be under reported by a LOT, but I’ll use that number anyhow. If we assume 930,160 abortions in 2020 (per Guttmacher), 1% of that number is roughly 9302. That is not a small number, no matter how you look at it. The implication that it is less than a percent of the total number of abortions does not make me feel any better. Neither does the current research make me feel better: that post 21 week abortions are being done largely for two factors – new knowledge (ie the mother found out the child had a problem such as Down’s Syndrome or Trisomy 13), and lack of access (by the time they jumped all the hurdles to get an abortion, they were too late to get an abortion except in the ten states mentioned above). (National Library of Medicine)

I don’t think anyone’s being honest about numbers, statistics, or abortion in general. The vast hordes of the Left really have no idea, and are just terrified and whipped up into a fervor over the whole thing. That terror is real, by the way. Every woman I know, knows someone who’s been raped and struggles with the idea that some states would force a woman to carry a child conceived by that rape. It’s an easy thing to use as emotional blackmail. It’s scary. That doesn’t mean we should allow it to dominate our ideals, but it’s something to consider and keep in mind.

In any case, when Trump said, “Just look at the governor, former governor of Virginia. The governor of Virginia said, we put the baby aside, and then we determine what we want to do with the baby…” what he was referring to was a child that survived an abortion attempt. And those DO happen. There are records of it (News Observer). We know it happens, but because of rules like the one Tim Walz put in place in his state, reports of abortion survivors are few and far between. Trump was not talking about having a woman go through a completely normal birth, and then deciding after the fact to kill her child. THAT is not allowed.

When it comes to frakking, Harris just lies all over the place. I don’t need to go into it. We all know Trump will do it, and that’s fine. I’m hoping he’ll see the joy of nuclear energy as well, but we’ll see.

And then there’s gun confiscation. All of us know Harris’s track record on that. Her statement in the debate, about how she and Tim are gun owners and so that means they don’t want to stop gun ownership, is wrong. Any gun laws enacted aren’t going to affect certain classes of people. That’s the problem with gun bans, after all.

Okay, I made it this far and I have to stop. I’m getting angry all over again. But hopefully some of this is of interest.