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PRESENT DAY 64 - Debatable Debate
Nothing should be made of the so called debate that was broadcast last night by CNN to the country and to the world. The fact that an elderly liar lies more articulately than a elderly man having difficulty expressing the truth should mean only that the liar is by far the more dangerous and unfit of the two. But that is not how the event is being judged. Since Biden is being held to a standard that Trump is not held to makes all discussion of the thing moot. Biden clearly failed to make the points he intended to make. He mumbled and at times completely lost his train of thought. It seemed to me that he was trying too hard to remember his talking points rather than staying in the moment and responding to Trump barrage of flagrant lies and projection. Even Trump was taken by surprise but Biden’s inability to call out his lies in real time. But once he realized that Biden posed no threat to his lies, the lies not only came faster and more furiously, Trump began projecting right before our very eyes, proving once and for all that he does this deliberately. For example, as soon as Biden called Trump a criminal - and inexplicably Biden did this only once rather than ramming that fact down Trump’s throat dozens of times - Trump simply called Biden the criminal, projected his own criminality onto Biden, and said that it was Biden who will be sent to jail. Biden again couldn’t respond to this. But lying is not debating. We’ve lowered the bar so low for Trump that pundits like Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times, normally reasonable, can say that Trump did not seem unhinged, as if spewing lie after lie after lie is anything but unhinged. If we could not see Trump as unhinged in this spectacle then there is no such thing as unhinged and we deserve whatever amoral clown we get as a leader. If we can’t see a pathological liar and con man for what he is when he is putting it on display openly for everyone to see, then we don’t deserve to lead the world. Biden certainly failed to reassure us that he is up to the job the way he did during the State of the Union speech, but calling for Biden to drop out of the race based on this ungodly spectacle is premature. The ideas of winning and losing cannot be applied to what we witnessed last night unless it’s to say that America lost because a pathological liar was allowed to spew lies without any sort of fact checking and almost no rebuke from Biden. If Biden was doing what he’d been prepped to do, the preparation was completely ineffectual. Biden ought to have spent at least half of his talking time pointing out Trump’s lies, calling them lies and calling Trump the liar that he is. Instead, Biden spent his down time trying to remember what points he wanted to make and then his talking time ineptly trying to make those points instead of responding to Trump’s lies. Biden is a decent man and perhaps it’s irksome for him to call someone a liar. But in the case of Trump, that is the only reasonable response and his coaches should have known that going in. They should have known that everything Trump said would be a lie and that Biden needed to call out the lies as fast as Trump spewed them. Yet they apparently told Biden to ignore most of the lies and appeal to whatever reasonable people might have been watching. If that’s the case, it was a big mistake and one that anyone who’s paid any attention to Trump the past eight years would not have made. So we were left last night with the choice between a lying con man and a doddering old fool but even that should be an easy choice. CNN ought to have known that Trump would do nothing but lie and yet they left it up to Biden to do the fact checking, thus doing a great disservice to everyone watching and everyone who has an interest in preserving democracy in the United States. To allow a candidate for the highest office to simply lie isn’t journalism. It’s the opposite of journalism. Certainly Biden failed to confront most of the lies but when the lies come as hard and fast as Trump can spew them, it’s an impossible task. Beyond the obvious lies, it’s impossible to fact check a lie that is made up on the spot, as Trump frequently does and did last night. Trump simply makes things up knowing that they cannot be fact checked in real time. It’s one of a good liar’s best moves and Trump excels at it. In the end we witnessed a confrontation between good and evil and I mean this very literally. Trump is the personification of evil. He is (fortunately) that rare individual who is entirely lacking in honesty and compassion, the two human virtues. That is my definition of evil. Good often falters in the face of this sort of pure evil just as Biden did. Biden’s faltering simply highlights the desperate situation that we find ourselves in today because of the sycophancy of elected Republicans, the corruption of our Supreme Court and the surprisingly large contingent of Americans who are plain old fascists with no interest in the traditional American values of equal rights and justice for all. Certainly Kamala Harris would have ripped Trump to shreds last night but I don’t think it’s time to jettison Biden right now. As I said, nothing can be made of a spectacle in which a reality t.v. star played the audience better than an honest man who thought he was in a traditional debate. That should have been expected as well. Biden even took the bait of comparing his golf swing to Trump’s rather than pointing out that those tournaments Trump claimed to win were the reason Trump knows so much about rigging contests. For those who want to make something of this debatable debate, I’d just say you, too, are playing into the hands of those who would end democracy in America, including most elected Republicans, Clarence Thomas, Sammy Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett. It could be that we are witnessing the end of the United States as a democracy. If that’s the case, we don’t have Biden to blame. Biden is doing his best to hang on to American democracy, more than the vast majority of us are doing. We’ll only have to blame ourselves. If we’re going to disqualify a man for trying to tell the truth rather than the one spouting nothing but lies, we just have ourselves to blame.