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Vivek Ramaswamy on Meet the Press: areas of concern. [1]

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Date: 2023-08-27

Here is a partial summary of the confrontation that just happened. Some of it is verbatim, and I put it in quotation marks. Some of it caused me acute dyspeptic distress, as it probably will many, because Ramaswamy is slick, and often sounds reasonable if you are not listening too closely.

Chuck Todd started with a mention of the RACIALLY MOTIVATED SHOOTING in Florida, which VR rightfully condemned.

CT: why is racist violence more pervasive on the right?

VR tried to make it a problem mostly present in Democratic-led cities.

CT: how about the shooter manifesto that circulated online?

VR, in an attempt to deviate, and with no regard to statistics on who commits most violent attacks: why does the politicized media not insist on seeing the manifesto of the transgender shooter who attacked a Catholic school? Why is the media treating that differently?

CT, after VR mentioned mental health issues as the cause of violence. “Is racism, then, a mental health issue?”

VR, verbatim: “I do believe that racism, in many cases, is manufactured in a way that creates more racism in this country. I cannot think of a greater way, Chuck, of driving racism in this country, than to take something else away from someone based on the color of their skin. And so, is there existing racism in the United States? Of course there is. But these last burning embers of racism, the last thing I wanna do is throw kerosene on it. And yet I think that’s exactly what the modern culture is doing by creating race-based quota systems that deny people access to goods or services based on the color of their skin. The right answer to stop discriminating on the basis of race is, as John Roberts said, to stop discriminating on the basis of race. And I am genuinely worried that we are seeing a new wave of anti-Black and anti-Hispanic racism as the consequence of the so-called anti-racism movement.”

CT: Your argument comes across as blaming those who are trying to create equality for the rise of racism.

VR: “I don’t want to be playing the blame game [cites Ibram Kendi, in order to depict him as incendiary and to scare White folks] The right answer is actually to restore color-blind equality, color-blind meritocracy.”

VR then argues that he is best suited to win in a landslide and take further the America First agenda of the “greatest president of the 21st century” (quick note: he is not referring to Obama or Biden. Let us all breathe into paper bags…. he does of course mean His Bottle-Blondness).

CT: if Trump made mistakes and listened to wrong advice, how would you make the federal government work better?

VR answered in 3 parts:

- he will “take on the administrative state”.

- he is someone with a deep understanding of laws. For instance, he realizes that laws protect civil servants from being fired on an individual basis only. No such protection exists for mass layoffs, which seem to be part of VR’s plan.

- he is able to reach young Americans, does not even talk about Democrats and Republicans, and is able to unite the country.

VR’s deep legal thinking also enables him to fudge on whether Pence’s reading on the Constitution on January 6 was right, and whether Pence basically did the right thing. VR floats the unprovable assertion that, had he been VP, he would have, by January 6, ensured that the voting public had full confidence in free and fair elections by

1. having single-day voting, on election day only (he later proposes making it a holiday. The holiday provision is the only thing I agree with him on).

2. using paper ballots exclusively (he seems to allege electronic manipulation of votes in 2020, but does not quite cross that line).

3. demanding that voters produce government-issued IDs matching the voter files.

CT then, good for him, confronts VR with GLARING contradictions between the book he wrote barely 11 months ago, “Nation of Victims”, and what he is now saying as a candidate for the 2024 presidential nomination. In spite of VR’s stooping to insinuate that CT has not read the book, the quotes are incriminating. Among other things, VR wrote that there was no evidence of fraud in the 2020 election and that most Republican politicians do not think that the election was stolen. He describes Trump as a “sore loser”, yet on Meet the Press defends the disgraced ex-president as having made bad judgments, rather than committing crimes. Here is the quote:

“There is a difference between a bad judgment and a crime [….]. When we criminalize those bad judgments that’s an abuse of the justice system. It undermines trust not only in our elections, but in our justice system”.

On the subject of his book, VR again appears as two-faced as any good cartoon villain. On Meet the Press he claims that “We have a victimhood culture that started on the left in this country. The oppression hierarchy….. My worry, Chuck, is that it can spread to the right”. In his book, though, published barely 11 months ago (but possibly written when he was a toddler prodigy???) VR wrote,

“The Republican party seems to be moving towards the position that any races it wins are legitimate and any it loses were stolen…. It’s just the preferred conservative brand of victimhood, a knee-jerk kind of sore losing more common to playgrounds than great republics”. (Nation of Victims, p. 111)

To recap, while managing to sound somewhat reasonable — possibly because he speaks extremely fast and relies on well-oiled tropes, Ramaswamy manages to

1. blame Blacks and Hispanics for the violence they suffer at the hands of white nationalists. According to VR, programs like affirmative action anger Whites, who feel that their access to education is now endangered by the admission of populations who were — are — historically discriminated against. VR conveniently leaves out the fact that applicants do not start from the same spot in the race to get an education. He also fails to consider the benefits of a truly multi-ethnic, multi-cultural society. I wonder what percentage of the Black viewership snorted aloud at VR’s mention of “these last burning embers of racism”.

2. take a swipe at the LGBTQ+ community, using the one recent crime committed by a transgender person as foil for the many crimes committed by racially-motivated Whites.

3. probably alienate most government workers with his talk of massive layoffs. And anyone receiving Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid benefits. Possibly the military too ( after all, they are part of the government “bureaucracy”).

4. possibly alienate moderate Republicans (an endangered species) by trying to avoid saying that Pence did the right thing

5. appear very, very green by simultaneously advocating for single-day voting while embarking on an anti-government crusade. I work during elections. Texas has 2 weeks of early voting, and sees very brisk business on most days, especially in cities. How does VR. manage to staff the polls on election day if nobody is allowed to vote early (or electronically,or by mail)? Or is the whole point to make voting more difficult, especially in the cities where voters are more likely to be inclined to vote for Democrats?

6. possibly alienate some young voters. If I were young, I would not like to be taken for granted by a 38-year old. Just sayin’.

7. possibly, maybe, one can hope, alienate some Trump voters who saw him whole-heartedly embrace their golden idol during the debate, then who read his book and saw Trump referred to as a “sore loser”.

In conclusion, the newest Republican boy-toy may be smart, but may lose some of his luster on closer inspection.

[END]
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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/8/27/2189993/-Vivek-Ramaswamy-on-Meet-the-Press-areas-of-concern

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