If you thought Kamala Harris would be the only Democrat debating Vice President Mike Pence this election season, you would be wrong. Serving as a partisan stand-in for Joe Biden’s running mate, on Friday’s CBS This Morning, co-host Tony Dokoupil demanded Pence agree with the Democratic nominee’s nasty assertion that President Trump has “cloaked America in darkness.”
During the hostile 8:00 a.m. ET hour interview, Dokoupil took it upon himself to be press secretary for the Biden-Harris campaign as he pestered Pence: “Joe Biden claims that the administration has, in his words, cloaked America in darkness, in anger, in fear, in division….There’s also partisanship at record levels, hate crimes at record levels. On the point of division and anger, does the Vice President have a point?”
The actual Vice President ripped the DNC: “Well, I found not just those words by Joe Biden last night, but so many of the speeches at the Democratic National Convention were so negative. They presented such a grim vision for America.” He then promised that the Republican National Convention would be very different:
And I think next week what you’re going to hear is we’re gonna talk about the first three years of this administration where we rebuild our military, we stood with our allies, stood up to our enemies. We destroyed ISIS, took down their leader, took down the most dangerous terrorist in the world in Qasem Soleimani. You’re going to hear how we revived the economy, not through higher taxes that Joe Biden called for last night, but by cutting taxes, rolling back regulation, unleashing energy, appointing conservatives to our courts, supporting law enforcement across the country. That’s going to be our message next week.
Clearly uninterested in giving the administration credit for anything, Dokoupil brushed all that aside: “Mr. Vice President, all of those points I’m sure you will make next week at the convention.”
Instead, the CBS host was on a mission to pretend that voting fraud doesn’t exist:
I want to get your comments on the possibility for a free and fair election. The President has been undercutting confidence in our election system actually for years now, saying it will be rigged, it will be corrupt. And the only way that you guys can lose is if there’s some sort of cheating. Respectfully, where is the evidence of ballot fraud?
Pence began to answer: “Well, I think there’s lots of evidence of ballot fraud in instances across the country – ” Dokoupil arrogantly cut him off: “There’s not, Mr. Vice President.” Pence hammered him: “Oh, sure there is, Tony. Check out Indiana, 2012, the state of Indiana, people were prosecuted for manufacturing ballots in the state of Indiana. And it’s happened around the country.”
Refusing to learn his lesson, moments later, Dokoupil sneered: “You bring up that example in Indiana. That wasn’t ballot fraud, those were applications. It didn’t have any party slant at all. And the reality is that when people look at voter fraud, you’re more likely to be struck by lightening than find a case of it and – ”
Pence provided a fact-check: “It was election fraud. People were prosecuted for election fraud, Tony. You can paper over that….People who are associated with a Democrat super-PAC were manufacturing election documents and they were prosecuted. That’s also happened in places like New Jersey and around the country.”
Dokoupil glibly remarked: “And that’s the system working, Mr. Vice President.”
The Heritage Foundation maintains a database of voter fraud cases across the United States and despite Dokoupil’s assertion that it almost never happens, over 1,200 proven instances have been documented.
When it comes to mail-in voting, Dokoupil himself did an investigation for CBS News that proved what a complete disaster a universal vote-by-mail system could be, finding a disturbing failure rate in the number of ballots delivered on time or at all.
Wrapping up the contentious debate, Dokoupil decided to waste time playing gotcha by grilling Pence on whether he believed in a bizarre conspiracy theory:
NEWS FLASH: U.S.—According to sources at the DNC, Joe Biden, a man who has been part of government since before Jaws, Star Wars, the Walkman, the NES, and the publishing of The Silmarillion, is just the man for the difficult task of fixing the government.
“This man who has been part of the broken system since 1972 is our last hope to fix the broken system,” said a DNC spokesperson. “See, since he’s been part of the problem for so long, only he knows how bad the problem is. So only he can fix it. If you got some outsider with, like, morals and stuff, they would be too horrified to even go to Washington in the first place.”
“No, we need someone who’s been part of the swamp and has participated in much injustice, oppression, and bloodshed to fix the whole thing from the ground up.”
He also has a cop helping him out, sources confirmed at publishing time.
Good for Pence for hammering back. Often he comes across as too polite to deal with these liberal liars but he threw it right back in their stupid faces.