Rep. Ashley Hinson, IA-02 was the guest on Iowa Press this weekend. I can see why Liz Mathis lost now. As an incumbent, Hinson has become a slick, well oiled talking point machine compared to how she was two years ago. As far as Liz Mathis, voters in the second district seemed unable to recognize and value authenticity.

The panel asked some good, pointed questions. They must have thought maybe they had something to do with Iowa’s catastrophic red wave, like maybe they should have stepped up and made it a little less easy for Iowa Republicans to get away with blatant lying on their program – the only place Iowans get to see our elected officials answer questions in front of the press.

But just asking questions isn’t helpful when you passively accept lies, word salad and non-answers.  Maybe they were just in shock or mesmerized by the steady stream of gibberish,  laced with an occasional factoid that a staffer slipped Hinson so she could sound like she is following along with issues and is doing her job representing all Iowans.

There was a follow up question or two, but it was hard to check because the Iowa Press site  layout of their transcript is now a single column, triple spaced scroll, impossible to find anything, and not even showing names indicating who is speaking.

Hinson said the following in response to a question about Social Security and this is what it looks like on the Iowa Press site:

And at the same time talking about

how do we encourage people to start saving earlier. Right.

Social Security is, you know, people are living longer.

People need to have more resources for longer,

for a longer life.

And so I’m focused on secure

that I would like to see passed,

for instance, that’s encouraging more people

to sign up for employer sponsored

retirement plans.

Getting younger people, millennials

who are not saving money

so that we can make sure we’re not ending up

in a situation where we have people

who don’t have benefits and have to retire.

[To be fair she said more than that but it didn’t help much.   I think it was Clay Masters asking the next question.]

So does that mean that

you would have sort of a George

W Bush system that he proposed back in the early part of

the century, whereby some people would opt for this savings

plan instead of being part of the Social Security system?

Good follow up question!  Kind of diggy like they normally save for Democrats, mentioning Bush’s brilliant idea was from the early part of the century.

One of them did also ask Hinson about Trump’s comment about getting rid of the constitution and something to the effect of how did she feel about Trump possibly being president again after saying that and her answer was, “Well, I hear from people who don’t like President Biden, either.”  And they let her get away with it.  I sort of get it though, I mean, where would you even start?

I have to say the panel tried to ask tough questions but if they’re going to continue to accept nonsense and let Republicans just make stuff up they should cancel the program or  rethink how they’re doing things. It may very well be doing more harm than good.