I thought this was a BS way to frame the abortion issue last night and because of the rule that the moderators could not fact check Vance’s lies (or even their own questions!) Walz had to just repeat over and over again that it wasn’t true. As TNR reports:
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz was asked to respond to Donald Trump’s outlandish abortion talking point during the vice presidential debate Tuesday.
“Former President Trump said in the last debate that you believe that abortion ‘in the ninth month is absolutely fine.’ Yes or no, is that what you support?” asked CBS moderator Norah O’Donnell.
“That’s not what the bill says, but look, this issue is what’s on everyone’s mind,” Walz replied, explaining that Trump had made way to destroy national protections for abortion.
During the presidential debate last month, Trump had claimed that Walz supported abortion in the ninth month—and after. Trump claimed that Walz “also says, ‘Execution after birth’—execution, no longer abortion because the baby is born—is OK. And that’s not OK with me.”
This is utter nonsense, nobody believes this, and the CBS moderators shouldn’t have used this as the basis for a question about abortion rights.
The moderators repeatedly asked questions of Walz that were shaped around right-wing talking points. When asking the two candidates to explain their leadership qualities, Walz was asked specifically to respond to reporting Tuesday that suggested he’d lied about being in Tiananmen Square in May 1989—a startlingly specific question, which clearly knocked Walz off his game. Walz took the opportunity to introduce himself to the viewers, and when pushed on the question, said that he “misspoke.”
Meanwhile, J.D. Vance was not asked about admitting to blatantly lying about Haitian immigrants in Ohio.
In fact, Vance wasn’t asked to account for a whole lot of things, in particular extreme views on the status of unmarried and childless people (aka childless cat ladies), his support for the Great Replacement Theory, his close ties to the Project 2025 people, his positive forward to the right wing provocateur Jack Posobiec’s book called “Unhuman” (referring to liberals) or his close association with very wealthy silicon valley weirdos among other things.
But we were able to get to the bottom of Tim Walz’s confusing the dates during a couple of months he spent in China during the Tienanmen uprising almost 40 years ago. Thank God for that.