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Dick Lanier's avatar

A few comments...

1) As I was reading the excerpt from the Vance interview, I couldn’t help but start yelling at my screen because of the totally misleading things that Vance said. Then I read AE’s synopsis and realized that I’m not the only one who sees the world the correct way.

I also found it interesting that Vance chose a relatively minor participant in The Big Lie to throw under the bus. Jenna Ellis basically worked for Giuliani. I wonder why he didn’t mention him. And what about Eastman and Powell?

“No, you can’t litigate these things judicially; you have to litigate them politically” – I’m not even sure what this means. Stealing an election would be a crime so the only place to adjudicate such a claim would be in the courts. What does a “political litigation” even look like? And of course he didn’t want the election litigated “judicially” because he knew that would mean that Trump would lose (the logic goes like this: (1) Trump tried the courts, (2) the courts didn’t agree with Trump, (3) ergo, using the courts was a mistake because he didn’t get what he wanted).

2) I haven’t read the entire interview so my further comments might be unfair. AE has made the point that there is a fine line between digging for responses and being harassing. But read AE’s analysis of Vance’s response and it suggests all kinds of legitimate questions:

a) What does “political litigation” mean?

b) He says that the claims were ‘litigated judicially”. But isn’t that the proper role of the courts when crimes have been alleged?

c) He brought up Jenna Ellis. But wasn’t Trump running what he calls “the clown show”?

d) What does it mean to “go to the states that had problems”? Every state (regardless of its “problem” status) had certified the election according to their state election laws. And every one of the “problem” states conducted many investigations (including hand recounts) often based on allegations from the GOP that showed that Biden really did win.

e) What does it mean that there needed to have been “an effort to provide alternative slates of electors and to force us to have that debate”. There was an effort to appoint alternate electors and there was a debate in Congress about them.

I’m guessing that I could come up with other questions if I thought more about it. But the important thing is to not let Vance (or anyone) get away with generalities or word-salad answers. You have to get them to explain what they mean. If Douthat did that, then he would have provided a “valuable service”. If he didn’t, then no.

3) “It was a mistake, Vance maintains, to spend all that time trying to prove fraud. The fact that millions of Republicans believed there had been fraud was enough.” – I think that pretty well sums it up nicely. That’s the sort of response that Trumplicants give when it is pointed out that no fraud was ever proven. No facts, just feelings.

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Glade Wilson's avatar

It's pretty genius sleight of hand. It's obvious that Vance could really be an asset to the country if he put some of that brain power to good use.

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