"And, by the way, they talk about this Great Recession as if it fell out of the sky, like, "Oh, my goodness, where did it come from?" It came from this man voting to put two wars on a credit card, to at the same time put a prescription drug benefit on the credit card, a trillion-dollar tax cut for the very wealthy. I was there. I voted against them. I said, no, we can't afford that." -- Joe Biden, 2012 V.P. Presidential Debate
The key is the part in bold. Specifically, that part 'them' and the final 'that' (singular).
Biden isn't lying. dawson seems confused by the difference between 'them', 'those', and 'that'. When you're talking about people, you use the word 'them'. When you're talking about non-people, you use the word 'those'. And when you're speaking about a single item, you use 'that' not 'those'.
To illustrate, all you have to do is consider this: "I was there. I voted against them (
Republicans). I said, no, we can't afford that (
ONE/SINGULAR)."
In philosophical / linguistic parlance, it is a matter of reference and referent. 'Them' is a reference. But what is the 'referent'? The referent is 'Republicans' -- otherwise the proper English would have been 'those' if he was referencing 'those bills'. People are 'thems'. Non-People are 'those'.
Consider:
I voted against those (bills) (non-people)
vs.
I voted against them (Republicans) (people)
Biden could have been more clear, certainly. But I think dawson is reaching here...
As for there not being a dime's worth of difference between the two, I simply must respectfully disagree. They're both hawkish, for sure -- yet Ryan seemed quite uncomfortable when Biden pointed out that Ryan seemed to prefer American boys catching bullets rather than the Afghani troops we've trained. And neither Ryan nor Romney doesn't like it one bit that Obama is removing our troops from the theater (Iraq and Afghanistan) before Romney and Ryan get a chance to use them to threaten/invade Iran.
But Biden would tax the rich more than Ryan would. And Biden won't turn the Medicare health care system into a Groupon-like voucher system. Whereas Ryan would give Seniors a voucher for say $5k and tell them to use it to go buy a health care plan that costs a minimum of say $10k (with no increases for inflation, and probably costing more for Seniors with pre-existing conditions). That WILL result in many unnecessary deaths of Americans -- Americans sacrificed on the altar to Moloch and/or Mammon. And that's actually important.
We lost a couple thousand people on 9/11. And in response to that attack, we have spent TRILLIONS on wars against dark Muslim people -- many of which undoubtedly didn't do anything to anyone. Yet now that we've spent those
TRILLIONS on those wars, we are in a position where we say we can no longer spend the
BILLIONS necessary to prevent the unnecessary deaths of MILLIONS of elderly and poor. We really have our priorities and sense of proportion out of whack. It makes no sense at all to spend trillions of dollars avenging the deaths of a couple thousand at the COST of allowing hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of seniors die unnecessarily due to out-of-reach health care.
