RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/mr-biden-will-transition-you-now-11603495321?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Joe Biden committed the gaffe of telling the truth about his climate policies Thursday night when he said he wants to “transition” the U.S. from fossil fuels. The Democratic nominee is admitting that he plans to regulate the oil and gas business out of existence, and Americans soon to be “transitioned” may want to pay attention.

“Would you close down the oil industry?” asked President Trump during the debate.

Mr. Biden: “By the way, I would transition from the oil industry, yes.”

Mr. Trump: “Oh, that’s a big statement.”

Mr. Biden: “I will transition. It is a big statement. Because I would stop.”

Moderator Kristen Welker: “Why would you do that?”

Mr. Biden: “Because the oil industry pollutes, significantly.”

The Biden campaign knew their man made a political mistake because after the debate he tried to backtrack by saying he had merely meant that he’d eliminate subsidies for oil and gas. He also insisted he won’t ban shale drilling, known as fracking, though in the primaries he had said he would.

But Mr. Biden was telling the truth during the debate, and his policy proposals clearly show he plans to strangle oil and gas. Behold the transition strategy.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/biden-lies-again-and-again/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=second

Joe Biden is a career liar and he lied some more in the debate, for instance when he dismissed the now well-supported New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s business dealing as “a Russian plant.” There is zero evidence for this. He offered this line:

There are 50 former national intelligence folks who said what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plant. Five former heads of the CIA — both parties — say what he’s saying is a bunch of garbage. Nobody believes it except him and his good friend Rudy Giuliani.

There were some headlines from Biden-friendly media to this effect, but this is a gross mischaracterization of the letter from ex-CIA chief John Brennan et al, which merely asserted that the Hunter Biden story sounded like a Russian disinformation op, not that there was any evidence for this. The relevant portion reads:

We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails, provided to the New York Post by President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement” [But] there are a number of factors that make us suspicious of Russian involvement.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/trump-won-the-debate-but-won-bigly-the-post-debate/?utm_source=

There was a low bar for Joe Biden in the first debate, given his cognitive challenges. Because he exceeded that pessimism, he won momentum. 

In opposite fashion, there was similarly an expectation that a disruptive Donald Trump would turn off the audience by the sort of interruptions and bullying that characterized the first debate.

He did not do that. He instead let a cocky Biden sound off, and thus more or less tie himself into knots on a host of topics, but most critically on gas and oil. So likewise Trump will gain momentum by exceeding those prognoses. 

But far more importantly, the back-and-forth repartee will not matter other than Trump went toe to toe, but in a tough, dignified manner and beat Biden on points. Biden did not go blank — although he seemed to come close, often especially in the last 20 minutes. Had the debate gone another 30 minutes, his occasional lapses could have become chronic.

What instead counts most are the days after.  The debate take-aways, the news clips, the post facto fact checks, and the soundbites to be used in ads over the next ten days all favor Trump. In this regard, Biden did poorly and will suffer continual bleeding in the swing states. 

We will know that because by the weekend Biden will be out of his basement and trying to reboot his campaign and actually be forced to campaign. 

So we are going to hear over the next week that Biden simply denied the factual evidence of the Hunter Biden laptop computer, the emails, the cell phones, and the testimonies from some of the relevant players as a concocted smear, a Russian disinformation attack. That denial is clearly a lie. It is absolutely unsupportable. And Biden will have to drop that false claim.  

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/a-big-night-and-a-better-day-after-for-trump/

P resident Trump would be in much better shape right now if he’d campaigned and debated like the guy who showed up at last night’s debate. To use a boxing analogy, I think he won the match on points, but the margin gets better for him in the post-mortem. Former vice president Biden said some truly indefensible things. Starting this morning and continuing for the next ten days, Republicans will be whistling through the groove-yard of forgotten favorite video clips . . . or, better, GOP favorites that Biden would like to forget.

In fact, the president wasted no time: He had a killer montage up on Twitter before midnight.

Worst for Biden are the energy issues.

First, there is the true thing Biden said that his camp is now desperately trying to walk back or restate: He wants to get rid of fossil fuels, in particular oil. “I would transition from the oil industry, yes,” he said. To put an exclamation point on it, he agreed with Trump that this “is a big statement.” Shortly after the debate, just how big this statement was began to sink in, so Biden went into damage control mode. He insisted he had just been talking about “getting rid of subsidies for fossil fuels.” But that was not true. As the several Biden and Kamala Harris statements in Trump’s tweet demonstrate, the Democratic ticket made their jihad against fossil fuels clear and unqualified, time and again.

Second, and relatedly, there is the false thing that Biden said: He claimed he had never indicated he would ban fracking. To the contrary, he has said he’d get rid of fracking several times; and Kamala Harris — before she started insisting, with a straight face, that Biden had been “very clear” that he would not ban fracking — was herself emphatic in proclaiming the dogmatic Democratic Party position: “There’s no question, I’m in favor of banning fracking.”

If you check out that brief clip of Senator Harris that I just linked, notice — it’s impossible not to notice — the cheering crowd at the gleefully progressive CNN town hall. It will zero you in on the problem Biden-Harris faces: To get to the general election, they had to win the nomination of a party whose verve and lots of whose money is on the far left.