Why Would The Candidates Prefer To Brawl?
In Part 1 of this series (link => here), we discussed what was wrong with the format of the First Presidential Debate of 2020. Here we will consider why some candidates might prefer to brawl instead of debate.
Why would some candidates prefer to debate the character of their opponents? It is easier.
- It is easier to attack your opponent than it is to explain one’s positions on the issues. It is easier to point out flaws in the other guy than it is to choose and to defend the best policy choices.
- It is easier to manipulate us. Politics tend to be tribal or factional because we each tend to dislike people who are unlike us, especially people who dare to disagree with “us”. We readily think those “other people”…
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Citizen Tom 
Tom,
Great post and links to the two-party platforms
In my opinion, if voters are concerned for the future of their children and grandchildren, only the Republican platform supports school choice.
Every other issue may seem important to one or another in our present times and circumstances.
However, the only issue that is important in my opinion that will help maintain the future of our Nation is to return to allow parents to choose their religious values be taught to their children which have proven over time in every Nation in the World to be the best platform to live by since the beginning of recorded history.
And as we should know, religious values are waning in the USA because parents cannot afford taxes to pay two tuitions.
And when we read the news, it is also apparent so is our Nation waning in the ideals our founders envisioned when they wrote the Constitution.
Regards and goodwill blogging.
Tom,
You may be surprised by this, but one of the things I like about Joe Biden is that he reminds me of you. He even looks a little like you. He has the same simple, even old fashioned, sense of fairness and decency that you have. Like you, Joe is not polished or glitzy. He is more homespun and down to Earth. Even Biden’s unsophisticated debate jibes at Trump simply seem just responsively off the cuff and motivated by frustration at Trump’s incessant rule breaking and bullying. I honestly can see you doing the same thing with almost the exact exasperation. You never could stomach a loud mouthed bully very well either.
Paint good old Uncle Joe as a secret socialist saboteur of democracy all you want, but it just don’t sing. I think that, if you look in the mirror, you are more likely to see simple decent Joe Biden staring back at you than the preening, selfish, self aggrandizing Donald Trump.
@tsalmon
We were all made in the image of God. We are all descended from Adam and Eve. That said I don’t think you know what you are talking about.
Secret socialist?
@tsalmon
What makes Biden and Liberal Democrats dangerous to our nation? What makes Socialism dangerous? Why is there so little practical difference between Socialism and Communism (or Nazism)? The issue is how we define human rights.
You say government defines our rights and gives us our rights. That is the basic assumption of the Secular Socialist. The Founders said God defines and gives us our rights, that He gave us government to help us protect our rights from each other.
What happens when government both defines and gives us our rights? Then we become the slaves of those who run the government. Slavery exists when the government says some people have the effective right to own other people.
Biden and Liberal Democrats may offer us the bait of a generous government, generous with other people’s money, but they do abuse and will abuse any power we give them. Human nature is what it is.
What happens when a People says God defines and gives us our rights? That depends upon what a People believes about God. The Founders, following Christian principles, wrote The Declaration Independence. They implemented those principles in our Constitution. Instead of promoting the “right” of some people to own other people, they tried (albeit imperfectly) to protect the right of each person to run his own life. They set up a constitutional republic with checks and balances. They told us that we must constantly struggle to protect the checks that they placed on those in power.
Biden and Liberal Democrats hate checks on government power. The evidence of that is abundant.
Tom,
Yada, yada, yada. Your usual Incoherent and ahistorical word salad about mythical rights and Utopian Americas that never were and never will be aside, the US is a mess of conflicting, evolving, devolving, and compromising ideological views on government none of which can or will ever be determinative, lasting or perfect because we live in a finite and fallen world which, by God’s design, teaches us that all our earthy inventions constantly vanish before us just as we think they are within our grasp, like a mirage. Only God’s love is eternal. All else is only vanity, windy dreams and false idols.
Our own inventions of self serving ownerships in anything, of permanent mythic rights to anything, but especially something as materially fleeting as our earthy lives, our solitary liberties, our bundles of rights and responsibilities to property or any other material facade of happiness will always crumble around us in life’s endless storm just as we think we’ve built it because it has a foundation of entropy, of sand and water, endlessly sliding in the winds of change. And when it all, all your ideologies, your selfish dreams of YOUR rights, washes away into the ocean of change that is God’s lesson on grasping at shadows, you will have learned nothing if you don’t look around the desolation to find that it is only love that remains, only our love of God and each other, the many manifestations of love come of God, that endures. God paints His most profound art in the color of sweet sadness, in the somber and fiery dawn of sweet unselfish sacrifice, in the joyful apocalypse of ego and Id, until only the love remains humble and triumphant.
Decency Is the threshold manifestation of that eternal love. Decency to each other is beget of simple virtue, the shifting compromise of selflessness over foolhardiness, and the striving for just a little better, a little more unselfish and a little more loving a life, especially when we are surrounded by false prophets and charlatans tempting us with golden elixirs to momentarily quench our foolish fears and desires. If we just do our best to act decently to one another striving imperfectly to unselfishly love one another, then our transient governments, our material rights, our wants and needs will take care of themselves. This is what it means to put ourselves in God’s hands – it means to always and in each moment accept on faith and with His grace the impossible challenge of His sacrificial love in the face of unrelenting chaos until the chaos evaporates and only the love remains. In simple terms, it means to act calmly and decently in love even when acting indecently out of the tribalism of our own idolatry of isms and hatred of their idolatry of isms will so gratifyingly satiate our momentary rage, only to leave us dying of thirst over the long run. Let us instead drink of living waters, of love.
Of the two candidates, Biden most strives to be decent and in contrast Trump actually glorifies himself in his indecency. It’s as obvious and simple as that, All your wild boogeymen of isms and your selfish grievances about absolute privileges you supposedly own are just illusions.
@tsalmon
You are just abusing the words “love” and “decent”.
We are talking about government, not personal conduct. We are taking about giving mere humans enormous power. You can assert all you want that Biden is a decent human being, but he has in fact lied repeatedly. One of his latest is the he never said he was in favor of defunding the police. He did.
Biden also wants to use taxpayer funding of abortion. What he did to Judges Bork and Thomas was just sick. By comparison, ….well, I won’t insult Trump by comparing him to Biden. Too low a standard.
When we love, we must love in Truth. Yet your words proclaim there is no Truth except love. Not so. God is Truth, and He has said we prove our love for Him by obeying His commands.
We each belong to God. He has commanded us to love each other. When we love someone, do we use the government to own them (the Biden approach), or do we let them pursue their own definition of happiness (the “mythical” Founders approach)?
Will we remain a free people? Is freedom real? I don’t see how you can say such things and believe freedom is real. Perhaps that is why you are so willing to give it away for so little. You remind me of Esau selling his birthright to Jacob for a bowl of soup.
You’re making war with caricatures, just shadows of yourself.
“ We are talking about government, not personal conduct.”
The fact that you consider them separate says a good deal about your own peculiar secularism, don’t you think? We can judge people by a standard we ourselves can’t meet, or we can say that in love and war and politics there are no standards, all is fair. The former is hypocrisy and the latter is cynicism. I’m proposing a third way. Let’s just set our aim in everything on the perfect love of Christ, and realize with humility that none of us will ever perfectly make it. It is in the striving that we are saved.
You want to point out what you judge as Biden’s personal imperfections although a plank impedes your vision. Again, it is not that Biden is perfect that we should vote for him, it is because he “strives” to be decent. It is not because we judge Trump is more imperfect than Biden that we should not vote for him (although that alone might be reason enough), it is because Trump glorifies indecency, he promotes it and basks in it. You want a thousand examples? Trump has never been shy about providing them. It really is that simple. Don’t you think it is time, especially for those of us who say we are Christians, to stop all this indecency and return to a little civility?
“You are just abusing the words ‘ love’ and ‘decent’.”
How exactly have I done that? Is your worship of hate really so much more fulfilling?
We can’t “abuse” God’s love any more than we can abuse God. The truly sacred can’t be really be desecrated. It is only our idols that we fear can be pulled down. You would make love into an idol, something unreal, impersonal and abstract. No wonder you think it is being abused.
Love that is not, personal, concrete and practically practiced everyday and in everything is not really love. Real love, God’s love, is the intersection of Heaven and Earth, a place where things lovingly sacrificed and seemingly lost in the finite material world store as eternal treasures with God, the intersection at the cross, the place where eternity meets entropy, the Christ incarnate. That’s what love is. Decency is just the threshold to stepping through that intersection.
@tsalmon
The fact you refuse to distinguish personal conduct and the government of a People is a problem. We each have the right to determine our own conduct. However, some people want to use others as their personal property.
Government exists to restrain us when we infringe upon the each others rights. When “we” use government to make others do what “we” think they ought to do, we pervert the purpose of government. “We” don’t love people when we do that; “we” enslave them to the will of those in power.
Even if Socialism was not inherently wrong, you don’t have the wisdom to make the kind of government you want work. The proof is simple. “We” cannot find anyone “we” can trust trust with such power. Biden? Harris? Those people cannot be trusted any more than you trust Trump. Yet even with someone you find as detestable as Trump in power — which should be proof to you of the danger of enlarging the power of government — you are still voting for Socialism. Sad!
“Government exists to restrain us when we infringe upon the each others rights.”
Yeah, who says? Government? Your Utopian fantasies? Because you want something for yourself, then God gave it to you? Or perhaps you think our slaver, white male founders said so? Where has your formulaic view ever existed? On the way to 1776 and long afterward, our forefathers committed genocide, human bondage and rapacious acquisitiveness, and manifest destiny, all in the grandiose name of protecting their supposed divine rights.
Nonsense, nothing “naturally” belongs to anyone in real life unless they somehow have the power to take it and/or keep it. Otherwise, we would “naturally” give the country back to the Indians, pay black people and poor whites and all women for the labor we stole from them over the centuries. You act like rights are supposed to flow like a river and government only exists to keep someone from damming the flow. In what world? When?
Government is an imperfect construct we constantly invent ad the finite and world changes for good or for bad, not some natural deterministic inevitability. In thousands of years of human civilization, government, including our founding government, has mostly enforced the desires of the few to be beastly to the many, of one group to exert some greater privilege to God’s material bounty over others’ right to that bounty. And even in the most altruistic governmental rights protection, courts must balance competing rights and competing responsibilities.
In so far as we have seen an improvement in human rights and human responsibilities to each other, it’s been unnatural hard work, unnatural because the most natural impulse of the human animal is acquisitiveness and control, not to respect each other’s imaginary divine rights. It is hard, unnatural work to have decent government because it is hard work to love each other enough to unselfishly allow the weak to have rights and demand responsibilities of the strong. It’s beyond hard work, it’s impossible, and in so far as we have come as far as we have, we have immensely farther to go before we actually, fairly with God’s love perfectly protect each other’s rights by perfectly affording our actual God given responsibility to love one another, but that’s the challenge.
You don’t like big government? If government actually did take it upon itself to distribute the supposed God given rights of every man, woman and child in the world to God’s bounty, then government would subsume all human interaction from sexuality to economics. It is because rights are so unnatural to us that government would be overwhelmed by the impossibility of weaving divine gold out of mere human straw. Nope, rights, like people, become more dangerously corrupted when we pretend that they are divine. Isn’t it impossible enough just trying to make the hard compromises and sacrifices required just to be decent to one another out of love and to constantly recreate a government that minimally strives to mediate that decency? Do we really want to ascribe divinity to government promotion of my or your interpretation of everything? No thanks.
Either way, how is a guy who has spent his whole life promoting one fraud after another supposed to give you your divine rights promoting utopian government? Or maybe that’s the point.
Nobody but Trump’s shrinking base is buying the red scare straw man. Socialist boogeymen is sooo 1950’s.
@tsalmon
Who says government exists to protect our rights? Read romans 13:1-7. Of course, you have trouble with the definition of words, but the Founders did better.
Some years back I wrote a series on the Ten Commandments => https://citizentom.com/2011/10/02/the-ten-commandments-and-government-part-1/. I suppose I would write it a little differently today, but not much. Why? The Ten Commandments prohibit us from infringing upon God’s rights as our Sovereign and each others rights as His children made in His image.
Think about what you are saying.
Does might make right? That is your argument. Yet you condemn stealing. Why?
We know innately, if imperfectly, what is right and what is wrong. The definition of wisdom is a good understanding of the difference between good and evil. However, we are fallen creatures. So, we are easily tempted to do evil.
Temptation. You are knowingly voting for outrageous liars. Yet, to justify yourself, you condemn Trump for being imperfect. In fact, because your arguments are so hollow, you resort to condemning Trump at every opportunity. Sad!