Going to my karaoke bar to sing Duran Duran’s “Planet Earth” turned out to be the strongest decision I’ve made this week, perhaps year. No way was I watching the Biden-Trump debate — and I’m a fella who’s live-blogged every debate since our sitting president, an avuncular fool who didn’t mind being a punchline, debated the governor of Alaska when he was a vice presidential aspirant. I had misgivings about the format before the debate began: the lack of rebuttal and fact checking in particular. In a sense Americans got the debate we wanted. For almost two hours Donald Trump lied, threatened, babbled, and smeared. The level of sociopathy renders the idea of fact checking — of debates — nugatory. You can’t “debate” a lying liar. So the Biden campaign was foolish to let this farrago continue even though the Trump people accepted the terms.
At the bar I stole a couple glances at Twitter/Elon Musk and understood our boy Joe was flopping. Hard. Democrats don’t wail — they shriek, they rend garments. On getting home three hours later I watched a couple clips at the beginning and another couple in the second half. The first clips were grotesque, just terrible — the second I heard Biden’s voice I though, “Oh, god.” He got better as he went along but it doesn’t matter. Debates are theater and depend on first impressions. Accustomed to seeing cognitive decline in my family, I saw the signs in Biden. A decline is not an end point; good and bad and worse days form part of it. But my family didn’t sit in the Oval Office. About the only smart decision the Biden campaign made, it turns out, was holding this debate this early; had it happened in September I’d be terrified.
And here we are.
I told myself in 2020 that I’d vote for Biden if his staff weekend-at-Bernied him. I didn’t want him as a nominee. I came around. and if he survives this embarrassment and lives through November I’ll still vote for him. When we vote for president we’re also voting for the administrative and regulatory agents that represent his and his party’s philosophy; we’ve had enough experiences in the last century with cognitively moribund chief executives to know it doesn’t matter much (to me) if the government runs itself by committee for a couple years. If the committee won’t do, then Edith Wilson and Nancy Reagan will. And if he dies that’s what the VP is for. In a post more Panglossian in spots than I would’ve allowed, Heather Cox Richardson notes:
A much bigger deal is what it says that the television media and pundits so completely bought into Trump’s performance. They appear to have accepted Trump’s framing of the event—that he is dominant—so fully that the fact Trump unleashed a flood of lies and non-sequiturs simply didn’t register.
. I get it: we expect the person who shoulders the burden of rationality to stop stuttering, stay on topic, and utter a coherent sentence. Apparently we can handle only one burden at a time.
We’ll see how many swing voters are as comfortable with my positions. And in the event that the party “dumps” Biden (how they’d dump him is unclear; there is no formal mechanism for forcing him out) I’d vote for the replacement gladly too.
It is, however, the Dems’ fault for tolerating this feeble gerontocracy.
Humanizing The Vacuum 
Between this fiasco and what has turned out to be a rather worrisome week for the Liberals in my own country, I’m officially terrified.
I’m less terrified than I was at 5:30 a.m.