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In today’s edition:
Promises made, promises kept! The vice-presidential debate on Tuesday was pretty much a fact-check-free zone. Thank you, moderators!
It turns out, Alexandra Petri notes, that when candidates are free to dissemble as much as they like, JD Vance and Tim Walz really do agree on a lot.
“You’re wearing a tie,” Alex imagines Vance saying in her satirical recap. “I’m wearing a tie. You have a flag pin. I have a flag pin. You think that when it comes to abortion, women should have more options. I do, too.”
Of course, ask a few follow-ups, and the greater optionality that Alex says Vance wants is an expansion of abortion bans to cover the whole country: “Imagine getting to choose from all 50 states where you would get to carry your unwanted pregnancy to term, rather than just Texas or Mississippi.”
Vance did this sort of “sane-washing” throughout the debate, E.J. Dionne writes, because the senator knows just how unpopular the GOP’s true positions are.
“You would never know from his gushing compassion for the victims of school shootings that [Donald] Trump and........