Each of last night’s contenders had a distinct mission, and both, no doubt, had been thoroughly drilled, over as many hours of gruelling debate prep as they could endure (probably hundreds for her, maybe a couple for him), on what needed to be done. Kamala’s job was to make sure that Donald didn’t hide behind his dead microphone and somehow come off as anything less than the unhinged lunatic we all know him to be. She had to bait him. Donald’s was to ignore Kamala’s barbs, keep his cool, plug his firehose into his always-handy bullshit hydrant, Gish gallop all over the stage with a broad smile on his face, chuck in the usual zingers, and above all, please, for the love of God, Sir (his handler implored, with tears in his eyes), keep his shit together and refrain from throwing his feces around the room as if he really was the spawn of an orangutan, just as Bill Maher used to insist.
So how’d they both do? Well, here’s Donald after Kamala ribbed him about holding sparsely-attended rallies at which the bored, battered, exhausted MAGA faithful begin leaving half way through, unable to take any more:
Here he is explaining that his radical left opponent (and former prosecutor) is soft on crime:
Here he is explaining his non-role in the events of January 6:
Something something open border blah blah illegal immigrants blah not my fault blah blah I don’t even know the guy, I was just there to give a speech.
Watch her put the boots to him about his Putin-loving, dictator-coddling, weak-kneed sycophancy for foreign tyrants:
Oh, she pantsed him, but good. If they’d been on a school bus instead of the debate stage, she’d have been giving him wedgies, atomic wedgies, and the dreaded Rear Admiral. It was glorious. She couldn’t have played it any better. She gleefully skewered his big fat ego. She needled him, goaded him, laughed at him, rattled him, and generally bitch-slapped him back and forth until his ranting, blithering ass melted right there on live TV like we were sitting through the final reel of The Wizard of Oz. In a way, it was no more than the usual for our Donny, and arguably not even the worst we’ve seen (at least he didn’t sundown and start slurring his words), but somehow, standing next to her, shouting his nonsense while she gazed over at him seeming by turns bemused and incredulous, radiating poise and competence throughout, he looked especially preposterous. Weak. Flailing. Back on his heels. It seemed possible, finally, that the infuriatingly complacent fence-sitters of the mouth-breathing mushy middle were at last seeing him for the absurdly ignorant, misinformed, intemperate, and generally unfit bundle of psychiatric disorders that he’s always been.
Anyway, that’s how it looked to the folks mired down here with me on the mucky surface of Earth One, as my favourite pundits over at MSNBC have taken to referring to objective reality. That’s also how it looked to eminent historians:
That’s how it looked to the pundits and lapsed Republicans fighting the good fight, too:
Great, but how did it look to the witless, low-information, undecided voters who’re going to tip the balance in this terrifyingly tight election? And how will the increasingly negligent corporate media spin Trump’s ludicrous dumpster fire of a debate performance? Early signs aren’t encouraging. This is the headline from todays New York Times:
Similar sentiments from the Washington Post:
This is the take on the CNN website:
Well, shit. Look, I’m not saying they’re wrong, from a hey-we’re-just-calling-the-horse-race perspective. The race is tight, and likely to stay that way, merits of the candidates be damned. These were the polls going in, believe it or not:
It’s too early, yet, to tell if there’ll be any bump in Harris’s favour following last night’s beat-down, but obviously, she’s going to need quite the boost to put her in a comfortable position to win come November, especially since, and I can’t stress this enough, the system is so skewed in favour of the Republicans that it’s quite easy to lose the election to the GOP even while winning the popular vote, as has already happened twice this century, and very nearly happened again in 2020. So it’s almost guaranteed to be another squeaker. The mainstream media are right about that. The question is why. If Kamala could build to a four or five point lead, that would overcome the systemic disadvantages built in to the American electoral system. Why can’t she do that? Surely, even the most meagre public understanding of what Trump represents, and of the multiple existential threats he poses, should propel any opponent, whether an obviously excellent choice like Kamala, or a useless but at least relatively harmless option like, I don’t know, maybe a Giant Panda, or for that matter a potted plant, to a much bigger lead than that. How is it that instead, Harris only beats Donald by a point, maybe a point and a half? Why is the American public so heart-breakingly oblivious to what’s going on, and to what’s at stake? Why are there so many voters seeing this as just another election, one in which upwards of 100 million of them probably won’t even bother to cast a ballot?
Is it maybe possible that the incomprehensible tightness of this race has something to do with how the mainstream media are reporting on it?
Look, I’m not asking them to put their thumbs on the scale, or abandon their precious (and increasingly obsolete and counter-productive) notions of journalistic impartiality. I merely insist that there can be no impartiality between lies and the truth. Just tell the truth, God damn you. This is no debate between reasonable people about policy outcomes (as if the frigging corporate media never showed any bias about such matters in the past). Trump is spewing dangerous lies that would’ve made Goebbels blush, for the love of Christ. Just last night, on top of claiming that ravenous illegal immigrants are devouring wholesale America’s thereby dwindling population of household pets, and that sex-reassignment surgeries are being performed on helpless, unwilling prisoners in the Federal system, the better to amuse Kamala and her fellow ghouls on the radical left, he repeated, for the umpteenth time, the pernicious lie that under many State’s abortion laws, babies are being put to death after being born, while rattling off lie after lie about the state of the economy, the number of migrants supposed to be pouring over the “open border”, the crime rate, and every other goddam thing under the sun. Report that, f*#%ing New York Times.
Why wasn’t this the headline today:
TRUMP CONTINUES PATTERN OF DERANGED LYING IN LOSING DEBATE PERFORMANCE
Or how about:
TRUMP APPEARS TO HAVE LOST ALL GRASP ON REALITY, SPEWS OUTRIGHT NONSENSE
Or how about you tell your readers what’s really in the Right’s Project 2025 blueprint for governance, and what it will mean if Trump wins? How about, when Donald claims that kids are going off to grade school as males, and coming home two days later having been surgically altered into females against their will, you print a couple of headlines about that? Oh, the brainstems in the undecided camp want to see more details about Kamala’s policy plans? Really? I doubt that very much, but OK, how about you set out just exactly what she’s been proposing, loudly, in public, for weeks now, last night included? How about you don’t just stand there with your journalistic thumbs up your impartial asses, reporting that gosh darn it, folks still seem to lack any pertinent information, and instead, just for a change, give them some?
You might note at the same time that about the only things Trump has proposed – tariffs on everything that gets imported, and deporting millions of people – are, just from an economic perspective, utterly nuts. Actually, the good readers of the Times, WaPo et al. might benefit from a little economics 101, so that they might understand, for example, that tariffs are not paid into the US treasury by foreigners, and that the economy is not a zero sum game in which deporting millions of workers just makes more opportunities for decent red-blooded Murricans. We may as well leave off any discussion of the appalling, Nazi-like cruelty of rounding up millions of people and putting them into camps for the duration while an attempt is made to find countries willing to take them, since, as I understand from all that diligent in-depth reporting, the only things Americans care about are “kitchen table” issues relevant to their “economic anxiety”. Fine. So let’s set them straight on the economics, shall we? Sound worthwhile?
Sigh.
And so on.
I could flog this flagging horse ’till the poor thing drops in its tracks come sundown. It does no good.
For now, I’ll wait for the polls to tell me whether millions witnessing The Donald in all his batshit glory has anything to do with how this turns out. I hear the ratings were pretty good, with close to 60 million tuning in. Could all those voters have seen what I saw and still figure what the hell, Trump deserves another kick at the can?
Well, yeah, actually. Oh, you betcha.
You know me, though. Until I’m proved wrong, I’m going to assume the best, plus we’ve got Taylor Swift on our side, and that ain’t nothing.
I’ll just leave this here:
the needlefish 