Vance’s Big Win Which Wasn’t All That
JD Vance is no slouch as a debater. We’d think even Tim Walz would grant that much after getting shellacked last night by the Donald’s running mate.
We will also grant that both men were civil, even midwestern “nice”. But that just goes to prove that most of the blame for the nastiness that pervades the current political process in America, and which has thereby buried the real issues, lies with the Donald. He’s just an incorrigibly bombastic, ill-mannered lout who substitutes name-calling, slogan-checking and bragging for anything that even remotely sounds like a policy discussion.
Of course, when it comes to silencing the real issues you can add to the mix the fact that the mainstream media faithfully shunts aside anything outside the UniParty’s “Overton Window” of permissible discussion.
Thus, the two network harpies who moderated the debate devoted a preponderant share of the time to secondary or non-issues like abortion, gun control, immigration and J6. At the same time, they did not ask a single question about—
- the nation’s catastrophic public debt and massive structural deficits as far as the eye can see.
- the rogue central bank that has shackled the US economy with bubbles, inflation, debt and mal-distribution of windfall wealth.
- a bloated Warfare State that is bleeding the Treasury dry and pushing the world ever closer to WWIII.
- the newfound eagerness of the Washington ruling class to suppress dissent and literally suspend the bill of rights with respect to speech, assembly, worship, property rights and 4th Amendment’s safeguards against unreasonable search and seizure.
Moreover, when it comes to even the mundane matter of fact-checking they allowed Tim Walz’ blatant lie about illegal border crossings being lower now than under Trump to slide by with nary a raised eye-brow.
As it happens, however, border apprehensions under Harris-Biden have been quadruple those under Trump on a month-after-month basis, as is made blatantly evident by the blue versus red areas of the chart below. But if you have your magnifying glass handy you can also see that for the month of August 2024 the 58,038 border apprehensions were slightly lower than the 75,316 during Trump’s final month in office.
But talk about cherry-picking! Harris’ running mate compared nearly the highest month under Trump with an aberrantly low month under Harris-Biden and than proclaimed “we won”.
That’s not even school-yard bullshit, but don’t blame the hapless Coach Walz. Harris made the same unfact-checked claim in the presidential debate.
Our real point is far larger, however. The back and forth between the two candidates on the immigration issue is merely illustrative of how the UniParty engages in make-pretend political combat, while ignoring the substance of this and nearly every other serious issue facing the nation.
In the case of the ersatz battle over immigration, it needs be noted that the red area above didn’t happen because the Donald failed to complete his big beautiful Wall or hired too few border patrol agents. And the far greater surge in the blue area wasn’t really owing to Biden’s alleged repeal of 84 Trump Executive Orders, as Vance argued, or due to Trump’s sabotaging of the so-called Bipartisan Immigration Reform bill, as Walz and Harris keep saying.
No, those are just phony partisan debating points that are, as Kamala should say, “unburdened” by the economics which underlie the chart above. Stated differently, there is a big economic “sucking sound to the north” that is pulling desperately poor Latin American workers and families into the structurally labor-short American economy north
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LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.