Debacle

Did you bet against me? You should have. You should have wagered the mortgage on my side losing.

Neither candidate was himself at last night’s horror show, at which a bizarre roll reversal manifested in what might have been the worst moment for Western civilization since the Visigoths sacked Rome.

I have a conspiracy theory. Donald spent a lot of the last week claiming that Biden was going to be “juiced up” for the debate, medicated with some sort of stimulant administered by “a shot in his ass”, which struck me as oddly specific. Every time Trump accuses anyone of any sort of malfeasance, it’s a tell that he is, in fact, doing that very thing himself. Every taunt is a confession; and boy howdy, was His Trumpness ever behaving as if some sort of spell had been cast. I don’t have a clue whether there even exists some sort of pharmaceutical cocktail that can render someone simultaneously more calm and more alert, but damn, Trump just wasn’t the same mumbling, yammering, scattered, intemperate idiot we’ve been seeing at his recent rallies. He didn’t rant and rave, he didn’t try to shout loud enough to be heard in spite of his cold microphone, he didn’t seem confused, he didn’t talk about Hannibal Lecter or how getting electrocuted was preferable to being eaten by a shark. All he did was lie, lie, lie, and lie some more, and that’s just par for the course.

My God, the lies! You should look up Daniel Dale’s fact-check. Donald lied about everything, every matter foreign and domestic, but he said it with conviction. He was crazed but bright-eyed.

It was Biden who seemed incoherent, tired, and unable to muster anything sensible out of his addled thoughts. It was poor Joe who seemed to be sundowning. “We beat Medicare”, he said at the conclusion of one of his meandering statements, giving the Trumpanistas a sound bite they’re sure to exploit to the hilt, and banishing all memory of sinking electric boats and menacing Great Whites. This wasn’t the President of recent speeches. This wasn’t the guy of the feisty and wittily combative State of the Union address. Last night, Joe just looked extremely old, confused, and, God help us, unfit for the job.

Jon Stewart, hilarious even while visibly dismayed, displayed a picture of Biden standing there, slack-jawed, apparently either confused or completely tuned out while Donald spewed his usual mendacious nonsense, and said, wincing, “look, that’s O.K…lots of people have resting 25th Amendment face”.

Ouch.

This might be all over but the crying. Not to panic or anything, but folks, it’s time to panic. Or so it feels in the immediate reverberation of the event. It was so bad that all any of the pundits can talk about today is whether there’s still time for Joe to step aside and release his delegates, so that a genuinely competitive Democratic National Convention can nominate somebody else, maybe Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer, Josh Shapiro, Amy Klobuchar, Kamala Harris, shit man, anybody, to run against Donald. I’m not sure if that’s possible at this point, in fact I’m sure it isn’t, but after last night I’m not convinced it’s a bad idea, either.

If I thought the broad American populace had even the merest glimmer of intelligence, I wouldn’t be worried. Trump may have seemed vigorous and commanding, but everything that came out of his nasty little sphincter of a mouth was patently, often frighteningly false, which ought to be enough to persuade anybody not to vote for him. I didn’t watch it live, but as near as I can tell from the post-mortems he didn’t utter a single truth all night, while the CNN moderators acted as if this was all business as usual, blandly posing their questions, and listening expressionless to the heinous, often irrelevant bullshit before moving on to the next topic as if they’d actually received some sort of answer. They didn’t even flinch when the prick repeated his horrendous claim that doctors are murdering babies after they’re born! Anybody armed with the smallest amount of knowledge, the slightest appreciation of what’s actually going on, the wispiest memory of what Trump actually did when he was President, or the vaguest notion of what he’s openly promising to do when he retakes office, might have felt doubtful about Biden’s ability to govern for four more years, sure, yet would still have concluded, upon being drenched in the blast of Donald’s firehose of filthy lies, that anything would be better than once again handing Orange Idi the power of the Presidency. No exaggeration: we’d all be better off if an eight-year-old of below average intelligence was installed in the Oval Office. I mean that. A dimwitted child who at least isn’t a psychopath would be a better choice.

A large sack of toenail clippings would be a better choice.

Anybody with a lick of sense would understand that.

Unfortunately, as I’ve been arguing in this space for many a year now, the American electorate, wielding the power to change the destiny not just of their own nation but of all of us living in all the countries they couldn’t even name, let alone find on a map, is, not to put too fine a point on it, about as perceptively clever as a baked picnic ham. Never in the course of human affairs have so many relied so much upon the decision-making of so witless a body politic. They don’t know Trump is lying. They don’t know anything. In a recent poll, 20% of them blamed Biden for the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade. One in ten think the Earth is flat. Something like four in ten think that the 2020 election was rigged, and Trump actually won. I’m supposed to be reassured knowing that eight in ten agree the Earth revolves around the Sun, which might, these days, seem like an encouraging sign until one learns that fewer than half can name the three branches of the federal government, over a quarter can’t name any branch at all, and fewer than that know that the First Amendment guarantees freedom of the press.

They don’t care about anything except optics, and they’re astonishingly forgetful. They don’t even remember what Trump’s first term was like, the chaos, the enormous budget deficits, the failure to build the stupid wall he promised, or achieve anything else of note except tax cuts for the rich, the botched response to covid-19 and resulting economic crisis, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of deaths that should have been prevented, the endless corruption, the violent insurrection and attempted coup on January 6, none of it. They actually think they were better off four years ago. It’s all about what they feel, and facts be damned. They feel like the economy is bad, crime is up, and the country’s a mess, especially in the Blue States, and their feelings are impervious to reality. If interviewed, they’ll actually tell you as much. “That may be true”, they’ll say to the guy holding the microphone, “but that’s not what I believe”. They vote with their brainstems, and they want Daddy back. Trump looked strong. Biden looked weak. Trump good. Biden bad. End of story.

Of course, the debate was a travesty, as they usually are. January 6 barely came up, Trump’s criminal convictions weren’t an issue, his civil liability for fraud and sexual assault barely rated a mention, and nobody hammered him about stealing classified documents, or any of his myriad other dirty deeds. Some members of the commentariat are insisting today that the moderators weren’t there to call Trump on his bullshit, that wasn’t their job – I don’t agree – but even at that they might have been just a wee bit more interested in grilling the bastard on his actual record as Commander-in-Chief. Absent that, it was down to Biden to take Donald to task, and he just wasn’t up to it.

It’s so sad. Joe just wasn’t up to it.

Yes, it’s a long time until November, and a lot can happen, blah blah blah, but look, the general public thought Biden was too old for the job before last night’s disaster. Standing there looking lost and past his bedtime, poor Joe sure didn’t give anybody any reason to think otherwise. Trump, somehow – how, I wonder? – rose to the occasion and seemed on top of things, which he assuredly isn’t, but that doesn’t matter. Nothing real, factual, or verifiable matters.

Shit and shit some more. I didn’t even watch, I deliberately fought the impulse to tune in, I pretended not to care, and still my team lost. I guess my feigned indifference didn’t fool the Cosmos.

It feels like it’s time to freak out, but we mustn’t. Biden gave a powerful speech today, back in form. If he keeps it up, maybe enough voters will decide that the old guy just had a bad night, but that’s all right, it could happen to anybody.

Maybe. You can’t blame a guy for hoping.

Listen, if you believe in some deity, or deities, now’s the time to pray, or make an offering, or sacrifice a goat, or beat yourself with a stick, whatever you suppose pleases him/her/them. If you’re a stone atheist like me, well, fuckit, pray anyway. You and I might be wrong, in which case you gotta figure that when things are this dire, a just God would sympathize, impious though we be.