The tape doesn’t exist because it never happened. Like most of the “proof” that the birthers have come up with, it’s completely made up. Senatorial debates don’t happen in a vacuum, especially those that have occured very recently. If that exchange had happened, media outlets would have reported on it then, they’d have it in their archives, and it would have been all over YouTube in 2007.
We’ve all seen the media ignore too many really important things (like Abercrombie’s open statements published in the Star Advertiser that what Obama has as record of his birth is in the State Archives rather than the Vital Records Office and isn’t likely to convince doubters that he was born in Hawaii) and too many things disappear before our very eyes to actually buy the argument you’re making.
It’s a nice hypothetical argument and might work if we were dealing with an honest media, but we’re actually dealing with a media that received a message that their kids could be killed (or cousins kidnapped...) if they or any of their on-air guests spoke about the eligibility issue.
When the only rule is the rule of the mafia, the standard protocols don’t exist any more.
Also, would you think that a record would have been kept of the procedures Dick Cheney used in the counting and certification of the 2004 election? Would you expect it to be written in the Congressional Record for that day, or the tape of that process to be available in C-SPAN archives?
Let me know if you are ever able to find that - to find out what procedures he followed for the parts of that day BESIDES the objection to the certification of Ohio’s electoral votes.
We can test your hypothesis using that situation. There are records for the 2000 election, and 2004 is more recent than that. Surely the C-SPAN tape exists somewhere, and according to your hypothesis it should be available. I double-dog dare you to find it, since it clearly should exist if there was an electoral vote certification in 2004 - according to your hypothesis.
While you’re at it, you might also see if there is archived video of the specific episode of a particular TV show in which the Egyptian ambassador said that Obama had told him he was and still is a Muslim who supports the Muslim agenda, according to Israeli sources. The claim was very specific, and anybody who wanted to disprove it could easily check the archived video and show that whole segment in question and show that the Egyptian ambassador never said that. But nobody has done that. Why not? According to your hypothesis, that video footage should be available somewhere. Will you find it, to test your hypothesis? If you intend to look for it, let me know and I will give you the specifics.