For the Record: Debate

Via The Log Cabin Sage, who retails a great story from the 1858 Senate campaign of how Douglas snidely noted that Lincoln had managed a grocery store in the course of his career, and showed himself to be "a very good bartender". Lincoln came back to it in his response: “What Mr. Douglas has said, gentlemen, is true enough. I did keep a grocery, and I did sell cotton, candles, and cigars, and sometimes whiskey; but I remember in those days, Mr. Douglas was one of my best customers. Many a time have I stood on one side of the counter and sold whiskey to Mr. Douglas on the other side; but the difference between us now is this: I have left my side of the counter, but Mr. Douglas still sticks to his as tenaciously as ever.”

Touché, gentlemen.

Candidate Yang made a couple of really annoying historical errors, when he suggested that folks in the ancient times when they used to debate socialism and capitalism never anticipated how economies would be transformed by automation

https://t.co/dY8d7cU1h2 pic.twitter.com/uZq9kDFokI

— Pray For the Opposite (@Yastreblyansky) February 8, 2020

and claimed the support of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., for his silly "universal basic income" program

Dear Andrew Yang, Dr. King's MINIMUM guaranteed income pegged to the median wage was a very different animal from your $1000 universal handout, a lovely present for somebody like me but not close to a living income for those who need it.

— Pray For the Opposite (@Yastreblyansky) February 8, 2020

Other than that, the candidates were on their best behavior, and I was impressed:

Don't shoot the comedian

Volodymyr Zelenskyy last March, at a taping for his comedy series Servant of the People. Photo by Sergei Supinsky/AFP/Getty Images via NPR.

Pleased on Thursday to note Washington Post confirming my speculation of Wednesday ("Vindman heard Trump himself asking Zelenskyy for the same thing, as a "favor", so you can see how serious it must have begun to seem, to him and to Eisenberg too, who decided to hide the transcript away before they had even finished editing it"):

Moments after President Trump ended his phone call with Ukraine’s president on July 25, an unsettled national security aide rushed to the office of White House lawyer John Eisenberg....

Gaps

Rosemary Woods and Richard Nixon in the Oval Office, via ABC News. 

Well, I'm damned. Of all the things I could have picked to be dead wrong about, the ellipsis-gaps-in-the-phone-call wasn't one I was expecting to hear about from the testimony of Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, but that's where he went, according to three people who spoke to The New York Times:

The omissions, Colonel Vindman said, included Mr. Trump’s assertion that there were recordings of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. discussing Ukraine corruption, and an explicit mention by Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, of Burisma Holdings, the energy company whose board employed Mr. Biden’s son Hunter.

That is, contrary to what I've been telling everybody for weeks, at least one of the three ellipses in what The Times is now calling a "reconstructed transcript" (i.e., a transcript created by a committee, not from a recording but from a robot transcript and two or three sets of notes taken by people who listened in, and group-edited by other people who listened—Vindman, as the NSC's senior Ukraine expert, was one of the editors) really represents something that's been left out, the one in the last line below: