Democrat Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has emerged as the leader of the Leftist
claque calling for Joe Biden to skip debating President Trump.
During an interview last week on CBS’s “This Morning,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (CA-12) reiterated her position that Joe Biden should not debate President Donald Trump. Pelosi argued that Trump “has no fidelity to fact or truth” and “isn’t committed to our Constitution,” she then asked rhetorically, “why bother” holding a debate with him.
Host Gayle King teed-up Pelosi’s screed by asking, “You had earlier suggested that you didn’t think Biden should debate. Do you still feel that way?”
“I do,” Pelosi replied. “Not that I don’t think he’ll be excellent. I just think that the president has no fidelity to fact or truth, and actually, in his comments the last few days, no fidelity to the Constitution of the United States. He and his henchmen are a danger with their comments, are a danger to our democracy. So, I didn’t want to give him — you know, why bother — you know, he doesn’t tell the truth, he isn’t committed to our Constitution.”
This latest rant against Joe Biden participating in a debate with President Trump comes almost a month to the day after Pelosi said she wanted debates scrapped to not “legitimize a conversation with [Trump]” because he lacks “any association with truth.”
“I don’t think that there should be any debates,” Pelosi said at the end of one of her regular press briefings.
She also said Biden should deny the president an opportunity to “act in a way that is beneath the dignity of the presidency.”
“I thought what he did in 2016 was disgraceful, stalking Hillary Clinton like that. I was disappointed that the press didn’t say, ‘Go back to your station,'” Pelosi said according to reporting by the New York Post’s Steven Nelson.
The claim that Trump lacks any association with truth has become a Democrat talking point regularly echoed by their allies in the Leftwing media.
For example, Seth Cohen, in an opinion piece in Forbes, wrote “Trump is almost never truthful. Trump… is trailing badly in the polls, which puts him in desperation mode. The President would likely use the debates to do what he does most frequently – present dubious and unsubstantiated claims as facts. Trump regularly uses his press briefings and campaign rallies as means to make inflammatory assertions without providing any evidence of their truth, and he would very much use the debates to do the same. Giving Trump one more platform to misinform the American public isn’t in Biden’s interests, which is why the Democratic candidate called for live fact-checking during the debate.”
Mr. Cohen went on to say that if Biden does in fact have an interest in debating Trump, “Biden should demand that Trump first release his tax returns and pledge to accept the results of the election. If Trump doesn’t accept the proposal, further confirming that he won’t comply with what have become presidential norms, then Biden shouldn’t give the President a platform to further break them. That would show that not only will Biden refuse to be bullied by Trump, but that he won’t let America be bullied either. And that wouldn’t be cowardice…”
Other Democrats have suggested Biden refuse to debate unless an independent fact checker is allowed. Democrats accuse Trump of repeatedly telling untruths about his own administration and as well as his critics.
The Far Left Daily Kos picked up that idea and apparently assuming it would advantage Joe Biden, proposed that the moderators, chosen only from the elite “credentialed” White House press corps, “gong” any candidate’s misstatements in real time. The candidate would then be required to respond to the “gong” and explain a valid justification for the statement or withdraw it.
Biden, for his part, appears to be intent on proceeding with the debate and given his own history of making problematic claims about attending an historically black college and that 200 million Americans have died of COVID-19 he is probably not in favor of independent real-time fact checking – with or without a gong.
That Trump will “win” the debates is not a given, anything can happen on live TV, but as our friend David Catron observed in an article for the American Spectator:
Ultimately, voter expectations involving presidential debates will force Biden’s campaign to sail between Scylla and Charybdis. If he tries to avoid them, he will be sucked into a maelstrom of ever-increasing speculation about cognitive decline and fitness to serve. If Biden is allowed to stand on the debate stage with the president, he will be eaten alive by the many-headed man-eater that Trump becomes in such venues, a beast that has already devoured more than a dozen GOP primary opponents as well as the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee. This is, of course, what scares the Democrats and Biden’s handlers. No matter what the former VP does, the debates will be his undoing.
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