"Where is the evidence?"

NEW: Former National Security Adviser John Bolton urges GOP leadership to "explain to our voters... that in fact Trump has lost the election and that these claims of election fraud are baseless." https://t.co/z6SZ06zbP3 pic.twitter.com/GyXya7xYAv

— ABC News (@ABC) November 15, 2020

"Biden continually interrupts Ryan in a way I find incredibly annoying."

I'm rereading my live-blogging of the October 11, 2012 debate between Joe Biden and Paul Ryan. It's making me view Trump's debate behavior in a different way. I hated the way Biden treated the very polite, earnest Midwesterner Ryan. Excerpts (with timestamps omitted):

Biden is being rude, laughing and mouthing words.... Biden mutters an interruption. When Biden is given a turn, he calls what Ryan said "malarky."... Ryan is speaking earnestly... and Biden is chuckling toothily, his body shaking like Santa Claus.... When Ryan speaks, Biden is laughing clownishly again. It looks just awful... Biden is acting as though he cannot physically tolerate Ryan having a turn to speak!... Biden continually interrupts Ryan in a way I find incredibly annoying.... While Ryan is talking... Biden sighs long and loud... Biden interrupts. Ryan says: "Mr. Vice President, I know you're under a lot of duress to make up for lost ground, but I think everyone will be better served if we don't keep interrupting each other." I love the politeness of "if we don't keep" — we — when Biden has been an interruption machine and Ryan has barely interrupted and only occasionally has talked over to keep from losing his turn. The moderator, Martha Raddatz has done nothing at all to control Biden.... The stress level is rising. Biden is so angry. Why is he yelling? Ryan needs nerves of steel not to lose his cool. I'm impressed that Ryan, when he gets his turn, is able to speak in an even, natural voice. It's hard to concentrate on the policy itself, because the emotional static is so strong... That debate was so annoying! Some of the CNN commentators are talking about how Biden did what he came to do, to fire up the Democrats. "This was not for the independents," says Van Jones. Okay, well, but independents were watching, and Biden was horribly rude. He created this disturbing atmosphere of anxiety.

Debating Trump, Biden got a big serving of what he dished out 8 years ago. Ryan did a fantastic job of maintaining his cool, staying substantive, and going high when Biden went low. And then he lost the election. I'm sure Biden would have been willing to do what he did in 2012 and be completely rude and irritating as hell once again, but he's 8 years older, and, more importantly, Donald Trump is not Paul Ryan. Trump is Trump, and Trump saw the ultra-polished and polite Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan go down to defeat.

Shoot horse?

I confess I didn't realize how dumb John Bolton was until I read his ABC interview transcript this morning. He's like Gary Larson's horse veterinarian who only has one treatment: "shoot horse." And apparently he thinks that's a "strategy" that Trump lacks.

— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) June 22, 2020

Here's the Gary Larson cartoon.

Here's the ABC interview transcript. I've read the cartoon. I've skimmed the (long) transcript) and don't really see the analogy.

Here's something Adams says about analogies in his book "Loserthink":

Analogies are great when used for humor. They are also handy for describing a new concept. But I try to avoid using analogies in the service of persuasion or prediction because analogies are not good for that. The target of your persuasion will simply pick it apart for not being exactly the same as the situation you are debating. If you live to be a million, you’ll never see anyone win a debate with an analogy.

Good use of an analogy (describing something): His posture reminded me of macaroni.

Bad use of an analogy (persuasion and prediction): We should disband the U.S. Postal Service because the Hitler Youth movement started with cool uniforms too. That’s where it’s all headed.

As bad as analogies are for persuading, they are even worse for predicting. If someone tells you a male lion looks like a gigantic tan-colored house cat with a neck beard, it doesn’t help you predict how the lion will work out as a house pet.

"So wild allegations. Of course we don't believe them. What happened is an American problem. We in Russia did not invent Donald Trump for you."

On "This Week" this morning, Martha Raddatz talked Terry Moran — an ABC reporter in Moscow — about what people in Russia think about the idea that the Russians "hacked" the American. A clip was played of Donald Trump saying "I think it's ridiculous, I think it's just another excuse. I don't believe it." Then Moran said:

Russians don't believe it either. Around Moscow and across this vast country, Russians are watching with amazement -- and some in the Kremlin no doubt with delight -- at the full-blown American freak-out over Moscow's role in the U.S. presidential election.

The heckling here at Meadhouse was: "Half-blown." (Because Americans who voted for Trump or accept the results of the election are not freaking out.)

They played a clip of Obama saying "Not much happens in Russia without Vladimir Putin," and got a response from Andrei Klimov (the deputy chairman of the Russian senate's foreign affairs committee and close to the Kremlin.):

"Because this is the only explanation of the results which are not so nice for him and the lady Clinton."

The Lady Clinton. I love that. Klimov was pushed — "You reject it?" — and he said:  "

"Absolutely. It's really, it's American fairy tales; it's American fiction. It is very convenient explanation because in such kind of perceptions, Russia is a threat. Kremlin is evil, all bad boys, they are in Kremlin and their main task is to make some bad things for America."

Moran informs us that Russian media is "dominated by Putin's regime and spews propaganda," and that their fake news — as opposed to our fake news — is that "It was an inside job, a leak from Clinton's own staff or the DNC itself." That caught my attention, after the interview, earlier on the show, with Donna Brazile. As I wrote in the previous post, something she said made made it sound like the material was leaked, not hacked.

Moran said Russians don't believe their own media — they know to be skeptical — but that doesn't mean they believe our media: "Even seasoned independent analysts think this scandal is more American hysteria than actual fact." We see a Russian commentator, Mariya Lipman saying:

"So wild allegations. Of course we don't believe them. What happened is an American problem. We in Russia did not invent Donald Trump for you."

Very funny.

We get back to Klimov, who says that Russians expected Hillary Clinton to win, and had no reason to interfere, because: "We know well who is Madam Clinton and what is her team." Trump was a big unknown, and there weren't "any real possibilities to think about Trump like a winner."

Finally, Raddatz asked Moran if Russians were worried about Obama, who "has promised" — in other words, threatened — "to retaliate against that hack." Moran said:

You know you don't get the sense that the Russians are very worried about President Obama. There's a sense here that he is a pie-in-the-sky idealist. Somebody said he has too many beautiful ideas in his head. They saw him pull back in Syria and they didn't get a strong response, according to U.S. intelligence agencies, from their initial probes into the DNC. They aren't that worried about an Obama response, it seems.

Raddatz came back with a question that made us laugh out loud: "But what if there is some sort of counterattack, counter cyber attack, how do you think they would respond?"

Moran said Putin — "a cautious and savvy player" — would would probably ignore it.

"Strict laws prohibit government officials from disclosing secrets, yet leaking has been a constant feature of American political life."

"Since the passage of the Espionage Act, in 1917, the federal government has prosecuted only about a dozen cases concerning media leaks of state secrets. That’s an astonishingly small number. [David] Pozen, a Columbia law professor, cites one estimate that, between 1949 and 1969, 2.3 per cent of the front-page stories in the Times and the Washington Post were based on government leaks. Another study looked at just the first six months of 1986 and found that a hundred and forty-seven stories in the country’s eight major newspapers were based on leaks. The entire career of Bob Woodward, perhaps the best-selling political writer of his generation, is based on leaks. And yet, with a few symbolic exceptions, nothing is done.... Pozen easily dispenses with the idea that Administrations don’t prosecute leakers because they can’t find them. They can: information—particularly sensitive information—has a pedigree.... Pozen argues that governments look the other way when it comes to leaks because it is in their interest to do so.... 'For a strategy of planting to work, it is critical that relevant audiences not immediately assume that every unattributed disclosure they encounter reflects a concerted White House effort to manipulate the information environment. The practice of planting requires some amount of constructive ambiguity as to its prevalence and operation..... Plants need to be watered with leaks'...."

Writes Malcolm Gladwell in "Daniel Ellsberg, Edward Snowden, and the Modern Whistle-Blower/From their backgrounds to their motivations, the two men have some striking differences." There are leaks, left unprosecuted because they camouflage plants from our government. But then what of hacks? Hacks are something else altogether — and that's the big difference between Ellsberg and Snowden. Ellsberg was a leaker. Snowden is a hacker.

Leakers... are interested in using and exploiting secrecy: they believe that secrecy, by its preservation and strategic violation, serves an essential purpose. The hacker, on the other hand, is a skeptic of secrecy. The anthropologist Gabriella Coleman has described hacking as the “aesthetic disposition” of craftiness and guile. “When lecturing to my class one security researcher described the mentality: ‘You have to, like, have an innate understanding that [a security measure is] arbitrary, it’s an arbitrary mechanism that does something that’s unnatural and therefore can be circumvented in all likelihood,’ ” she writes.

I was thinking about Gladwell's article when I was watching "This Week" this morning. Martha Raddatz was interviewing Donna Brazile:

RADDATZ: Well, do you bear any responsibility, does the Democratic National Committee bear any responsibility because they weren't prepared for something like this, or even have a chain of command going from, as you say, the Geek Squad up to more senior leadership.

BRAZILE: There's no question. I took full responsibility, Martha. I went to the Democratic convention. I spent the entire month of July, August apologizing because of the leaked, stolen emails....

As I watched that live, I thought Brazile said "leaked" then caught herself and substituted the word "stolen." I think she did not mean to say "leaked." That made me suspicious! Did the truth slip out?

Here, I've clipped out the precise point. Check my suspicion:



I hear resonance with what Julian Assange said the other day: "Our source is not the Russian government... We’re unhappy that we felt that we needed to even say that it wasn’t a state party... We have ... a strong interest in protecting our sources, and so we never say anything about them, never ruling anyone in or anyone out.... [W]e’ve had to come out and say 'no, it’s not a state party. Stop trying to distract in that way and pay attention to the content of the publication.'"

The so-called "town hall" debate.

It wasn't much of a "town hall" debate was it? I felt sorry for those people who had to sit and be background for 90 minutes. There were so few of them. Each one stood out and had to sit still and look alive, but though they were few, most never got called on. Those who did get a shot asked the most simple, pathetic questions. As I try to recall the questions this morning, they all seemed to be a short plea: What will you do to encourage people like me?

The candidates mostly ignored the person and even the question and plugged in something they wanted to talk about. They never did any of the sort of emotive, bonding-with-the-questioner performance that we are urged to think of when we hear the words "town hall debate." They ran out the clock, and then one of the moderators — in the guise of a "follow-up" question — would replace the "town"person's question with something more specific.

Here's the transcript of last night's debate. I'm going to read the questions and test myself. Am I right about what I just said? (Or do you need me to talk about the fly that landed on Hillary Clinton's face or the way Trump and Hillary didn't shake hands at the beginning and did shake hands in the end? Meade wanted me to rewind and get a video of the fly's antics. I could be first with the news of the fly! Have you ever heard of insect politics? Neither have I. Insects... don't have politics. They're very... brutal. No compassion, no compromise. We can't trust the insect. We rewound and laughed a lot, but I left it to the internet to take the pictures.)



Question 1 came from a teacher. She wanted to know if the candidates "feel" they are "modeling appropriate and positive behavior for today’s youth." Hillary, going first and setting the tone, boosted the ego of the townswoman by pronouncing her question "very good" and "important." She then proceeded to ignore the question and go into her standard line "our country really is great because we’re good." That's been her pat answer to Trump's banal "Make America Great Again." So when Trump got his turn, he knew where to go: His "whole concept" has been "to make America great again." A typical cascade of short sentences flowed out of that mental prompt, and nothing got back to the townswoman's question.

"You know, I speak with people inside her circle, and one of the reason why they don't like her in large groups or to do press conferences is because she doesn't play well there."

"She's not comfortable in that position. That's only going to make her look more staged, more strategic and less authentic. And so, it's a purposeful strategy why she's not doing press conferences, because that will only add to her unfavorabilities. Look, the email thing, is just terrible, in my opinion, especially when you start looking at the rationale. You know, Matthew and I were joking. She thought the 'c' was to help her put things in alphabetical order. But there's no 'a,' there's no 'b,' and there's no 'd.'"

Said ABC news contributor LZ Granderson today on ABC's "This Week," after the host Martha Raddatz asked him whether Hillary Clinton is "doing enough" about her problem of her favorability rating being at "an all-time low among registered voters, now on par with Donald Trump at 59 percent and 60 percent respectively." Granderson began his answer with: "Well, I they think what they're doing is not adding to the problem."

That is, Hillary is being kept under wraps, because if we see her, we'll only like her less.

And then ABC News chief political analyst, Matthew Dowd attempts to do gender politics:

[Hillary] is judged -- she is judged a little bit, I have to say, all of the controversy surrounding her and they're both -- Donald Trump and her, she's judged a little bit on a Ginger Rogers standard, which is, is that the bar is so low for him. I mean, Ginger Rogers, the famous like she did everything Fred Astaire did but backwards and in heels.

Suddenly, Trump is the Fred Astaire, judged by an easier standard when what his opponent/partner is doing is actually harder?



Obama used the old "backwards and in high heels" line at the Democratic convention last month. He was trying to help Hillary... even though Hillary used "backwards in high heels" against him in 2008:

She said Obama had noted that she looked rested since she ended her campaign against him for the Democratic nomination, and she told him she’d been exercising for a change.

“During the campaign … Barack would get up faithfully every morning and go to the gym. I would get up and have my hair done,” she said as she introduced him. “It’s one of those Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire things.”

She can't use that getting-my-hair done line in 2016, Trump's hair being what it is. (And by the way, what is it?)

Anyway, the political use of the old Ginger Rogers line goes back to at least 1988, when the future governor of Texas, Ann Richards, gave the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention: "[I]f you give [women] a chance, we can perform. After all, Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards and in high heels." (The pre-political use came not from Ginger Rogers herself, but from Frank and Ernest.)

But, I'm sorry, I sure don't see Hillary getting judged by a tougher standard than Donald Trump. It's the other way around. It's quite obvious. So it's a cliché, which is another reason not to say it. But it doesn't even serve your purpose, Matthew Dowd, because it's patently inapt and only draws attention to the fact that the backwards here is the bending over that the media have been doing for Hillary.

Now, let's see if Donald Trump can dance like Fred Astaire:

Lester Holt, Martha Raddatz, Anderson Cooper and Chris Wallace.

"Mr. Holt, the anchor of the 'NBC Nightly News,' will moderate the first debate on Sept. 26; Ms. Raddatz of ABC and Mr. Cooper of CNN will moderate the town hall debate on Oct. 9; and Mr. Wallace of Fox News will handle the final debate on Oct. 19. All are first-time presidential debate moderators."

The NYT reports.

Looks like they took one from each network... except CBS. But: " the CBS News correspondent Elaine Quijano will moderate the vice-presidential debate on Oct. 4."

"As you know, Trump has branded Clinton as 'crooked.' And that branding has stuck."

"If you doubt it, watch ABC’s Martha Raddatz literally imagine the word 'crooked' in a Trump tweet she is reading about Clinton," says Scott Adams, linking to my video clip of the Raddatzzlement:



Adams goes on to observe that "the Clinton campaign has put together an impressive confirmation bias case that Trump is a racist," but: "In a contest for the office of the Presidency of the United States in 2016, crooked beats racist every time." And he doesn't mean that crooked is a more powerful insult than racist. He means that the person perceived as crooked will beat out the person perceived as racist.

What can Trump do? Adams says his message should be: "Clinton has a race-first view of the world that is corrosive to society./Trump has an American-first view of the world that creates healthy competition with other countries."

I said something similar a week ago: 

I think what Trump is going to try to do — which he started yesterday — is argue that the true meaning of "racist" is what Democrats do, which is to openly talk about everyone — and to frame political appeals — in racial terms. What Trump said yesterday — about Elizabeth Warren — was "She made up her heritage which I think is racist. I think she's a racist actually, because what she did was very racist." The idea is: It's racist to exploit race, and they do that all the time. Democrats can be relied on to cite race continually, and Trump will have a lot of "there you go again" opportunities: They're trying to divide us by race to get political power for themselves. I will never do that.

ABC's Martha Raddatz hilariously misreads a Donald Trump tweet — She adds "Crooked" in front of "Hillary Clinton"!

Here's Trump's tweet...

It is impossible for the FBI not to recommend criminal charges against Hillary Clinton. What she did was wrong! What Bill did was stupid!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 2, 2016

... and here's video, where you will see that tweet on screen, and Raddatz inserts the word "crooked"



I love the emphasis she puts on the word "crooked" as if she's stressing that's his word, not mine. But why did that word jump out of her head? Why did she imagine it there in the tweet? It could be that she actually thinks Hillary is crooked, but it at least means that Trump has — with his repeated use of the same adjective in front of Hillary's name — insinuated his way into our mind or at least the mind of Raddatz, causing us to see it when it isn't even there.

How hard was it, really, to answer the question, asked at last night's debate, whether young women should have to register for the military draft?

Here's the transcript.

Martha Raddatz noted that Army and Marine Corps leaders just said they thought women, like men, should have to register for the draft — the nonexistent draft. Shouldn't we ask why we impose ritual form-filing on anyone?

Raddatz prefaced her question to the candidates with: "Many of you have young daughters." I find that offensive, but maybe you think it properly pokes at the conscience or moral feeling. Why shouldn't the prod be "Many of you have young sons"? Why are sons burdened with something that daughters get to ignore? Do we even remember the traditional answer? Young men's bodies are expendable. Women's bodies are needed to produce the next generation of expendable males and baby-making females.

Raddatz aims first at Rubio. Does he think "young women [should] be required to sign up for Selective Service in case of a national emergency?" Rubio begins with the recognition that woman do now serve in combat and that he supports it "so long as the minimum requirements necessary to do the job are not compromised." Fine, but those are volunteers. What about exposing women to some future draft? He says: "Selective Service should be opened up for both men and women...." Opened up? Isn't that odd? We're talking about imposing a requirement, not creating options. He quickly moves on to a military topic where he's got talking points to dump — rebuilding our too-small Army, Navy, and Air Force.

Raddatz moves on to Jeb Bush, who completely fails to answer the question. He babbles about not imposing a "political agenda" on the military, the right (not the requirement) of women to serve in combat if they can meet "minimum requirements," and how we shouldn't be "weak militarily" and just "talk about red lines, and ISIS being the J.V. team, and reset buttons and all this." Raddatz tries to pull him back to the question, and he responds with the assertion that the draft won't be reinstituted. There's quite a bit more pushing by Raddatz to get him onto the question, and though at one point he reveals he knows what the question is — "You — you asked a question not about the draft, you asked about registering" — he never gives one word of an answer.

At this point, Chris Christie breaks in: "Martha? Can I — can I be really — can I be really clear on this, because I am the father of two daughters?" Demanding to go next? Playing the I-have-2-daughters card? He gets away with this, and he'd better answer the actual question.

What my wife and I have taught our daughters right from the beginning, that their sense of self-worth, their sense of value, their sense of what they want to do with their life comes not from the outside, but comes from within. And if a young woman in this country wants to go and fight to defend their country, she should be permitted to do so.

I get that he wants women to think of him as the one who cares about women, but permission to serve if you want is exactly not what registering for the draft is about. But he moves to the right subject:

Part of that also needs to be part of a greater effort in this country, and so there’s no reason why one — young women should be discriminated against from registering for the selective service. 

Let's just pretend it's the women who are being discriminated against. Do viewers not see that the current discrimination is against men and that the proposal is not to increase but to limit the options open to women?

The fact is, we need to be a party and a people that makes sure that our women in this country understand anything they can dream, anything that they want to aspire to, they can do. That’s the way we raised our daughters and that’s what we should aspire to as president for all of the women in our country.

Back to the old cheerleading for women and the treacle about dreams. They say you can "be all that you can be" in the Army as they encourage you to volunteer, but there is at least one very obvious thing that you cannot be in the Army. You can't be a person who is not in the Army.

So Christie got away with interrupting to take the opportunity to promote himself as a champion of feminine fulfillment, and he only answered the question in the form of pretending it meant close to the opposite of what it means.

Now, Ben Carson decides to butt in:

CARSON: Can I say something...

RADDATZ: We just covered — wait one second, Dr. Carson.

CARSON: Something about the draft. Very quickly.

RADDATZ: Very quickly.

He talks about the decrease in volunteers but not the draft as a solution. He wants to treat veterans better, helping them with health care and "integrating them back into society." And then "we won’t have to ever worry about a draft again." So, like Jeb, his only point is there shouldn't need to be a draft. Not a word about the real subject: whether men alone or men and women or nobody should — in a country with no draft — have to register for the draft.

How incredibly annoying! It's a difficult question, one I've discussed many time in constitutional law classes, and no one engaged on the level that would get any credit at all on a law school exam. That is, they're not even showing that they understand the question. But you understand the question, I trust. So take this poll and discuss it in the comments.

Here's the Supreme Court case that said it's not a violation of the Equal Protection Clause to require men but not women to register for the draft. That's from 1981, but if you think that's wrong, you should be disturbed that we're still following it. Congress is free to end the discrimination either because disagrees with the Court or because it prefers a stricter standard of formal equality. That stricter formal equality is achievable either by ending registration for the draft or by including women along with men. The alternative that we have now can be defended as a substantive — as opposed to formal — equality, in which the physical differences between male and female bodies justify the different treatment.

In times of dire military emergency, when a draft would be needed, government overcomes the individual's freedom, and in that awful situation, it may see males as expendable and females as necessary to rebuild the population. But so what? If everyone is registered, the government will know who's male and who's females, and if the draft comes, it can restrict the draft to males if it wants. I don't expect any political candidate to talk about this on the level that would satisfy me, but I am criticizing them for failing to answer the question Raddatz asked.

While there is no draft, who should be required to register for the draft?

No one, but if anyone, only men.

No one, but if anyone, both men and women.

Only men.

Men and women.

 

pollcode.com free polls

Scott Walker: "I wouldn’t bet against me on anything."

The cocky last line of his interview with Martha Raddatz on ABC's "This Week" this morning. Read/watch the whole thing here. (Kudos to ABC for getting the transcript and video up so quickly!)

Raddatz really keeps up the pressure throughout this interview, perhaps trying to make some news by making him look dumb/unprepared/unstable the way Katie Couric tripped up Sarah Palin. But Walker held steady, speaking without hesitation and without droning on, stepping up to tough questions on Syria and immigration, and not showing any irritation at Raddatz's multiple interruptions.

"FLASH: TV RATINGS FOR VP DEBATE DOWN SHARPLY... DEVELOPING... "

Says Drudge, in all caps, which... isn't that yelling? I'm tired of all this yelling!

CBS 10.4 MILLION
ABC 6.9 MILLION
NBC 6.8 MILLION
FOX 5.3 MILLION

*CABLE NUMBERS LATER TODAY...
**69.9 MILLION WATCHED IN 2008...

As I said, I'm tired of the yelling. I found the debate really hard to watch, but I kept watching because I was committed to live-blogging. Even still, I got catatonic. There was a point when I didn't write anything for 20 minutes and then I said:

Biden has been yelling at Martha Raddatz for the last 15 minutes (as the subject is war). It's so inappropriate!

The previous post had been:

The stress level is rising. Biden is so angry. Why is he yelling? Ryan needs nerves of steel not to lose his cool. I'm impressed that Ryan, when he gets his turn, is able to speak in an even, natural voice. It's hard to concentrate on the policy itself, because the emotional static is so strong.

That shows how I felt: pain. So here's my question. Ratings were down, I see, but when were the ratings taken? In the beginning? How did the ratings drop off over the course of the 90 minutes? Who was still around when Biden was yelling at Martha Raddatz for 15 minutes? How did the gender balance change over the course of the evening? I'll bet people — especially women — left in droves and the ratings were overall much worse than those already-low numbers say. And for the people that instinctively — with good human sense — clicked away, what was lodged in their mind was revulsion toward Biden. That's what happened to me. But then I stuck around, enduring the (second hand) brow-beating and bullying.

You know, I have an aversion to politics. If you've been reading this blog for a while, you might remember the old subtitle "Politics and the aversion to politics...." That was absolutely sincere. I am one of the many people — sensible people, many of them women! — who naturally withdraw from the political debate. It's just not worth it. Life is short, and much of it is beautiful and full of love. I want to go somewhere else. But somewhere else for me has been writing — ironically, about politics. That's an odd thing about me, but it puts me in a position where I can see some things that typical political junkies don't see. And I think I speak — in some way — for the people who would not watch that debate, certainly not much more than 20 minutes of it, with Biden's childish, clownish rudeness.

VP debate substance: "Biden contradicts State Department on Benghazi security."

Josh Rogin at Foreign Policy:

"We weren't told they wanted more security. We did not know they wanted more security there," Biden said.

In fact, two security officials who worked for the State Department in Libya at the time testified Thursday that they repeatedly requested more security and two State Department officials admitted they had denied those requests.

"All of us at post were in sync that we wanted these resources," the top regional security officer in Libya over the summer, Eric Nordstrom, testified. "In those conversations, I was specifically told [by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Charlene Lamb] ‘You cannot request an SST extension.' I determined I was told that because there would be too much political cost. We went ahead and requested it anyway."

Nordstrom was so critical of the State Department's reluctance to respond to his calls for more security that he said, "For me, the Taliban is on the inside of the building."

"We felt great frustration that those requests were ignored or just never met," testified Lt. Col. Andrew Wood, a Utah National Guardsman who was leading a security team in Libya until August.

House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) released the unclassified cables containing those requests.

Was Biden ignorant of all this, was he lying at the debate, or did he mean to assert that the State Department officials were lying?

The Libya question opened the debate. Let's look at the transcript: