“Biden said he “beat Medicare”? So what? Trump unironically called him Brandon without even realizing it and said he was 86 years old. We’re really doing all this over some gaffes and pauses, after all Biden’s accomplishments? You all do understand that the actual Presidency is not an episode of The West Wing where snappy Aaron Sorkin dialogue counts for anything, right? You understand that debating has essentially nothing to do with being President? Just mentally compare Trump and Biden’s first terms. Has Biden told you to drink bleach, or shine a UV light up your ass or through your circulatory system or whatever Trump was implying? Has he gaslighted you that you know what “covfefe” means? Has he gotten a million Americans needlessly killed in a pandemic? One of these men is the most effective President since FDR, and the other man was the worst President in history and will make his first round look like a picnic if reelected. It will quite literally be the end of the American experiment. You’re ignoring that to privilege how a 90-minute screen test made you feel? Give me a break. You already know who both of these guys are from their records. You know this debate didn’t actually matter. The facts prove it.”
“This was not a debate. It was Trump using a technique that actually has a formal name, the Gish gallop, although I suspect he comes by it naturally. It’s a rhetorical technique in which someone throws out a fast string of lies, non-sequiturs, and specious arguments, so many that it is impossible to fact-check or rebut them in the amount of time it took to say them. Trying to figure out how to respond makes the opponent look confused, because they don’t know where to start grappling with the flood that has just hit them. It is a form of gaslighting, and it is especially effective on someone with a stutter, as Biden has. It is similar to what Trump did to Biden during a debate in 2020. In that case, though, the lack of muting on the mics left Biden simply saying: “Will you shut up, man?” a comment that resonated with the audience. Giving Biden the enforced space to answer by killing the mic of the person not speaking tonight actually made the technique more effective. There are ways to combat the Gish gallop—by calling it out for what it is, among other ways—but Biden retreated to trying to give the three pieces of evidence that established his own credentials on the point at hand. His command of those points was notable, but the difference between how he sounded at the debate and how he sounded on stage at a rally in Raleigh, North Carolina, just an hour afterward suggested that the technique worked on him. That’s not ideal, but as Monique Pressley put it, “The proof of Biden’s ability to run the country is the fact that he is running it. Successfully. Not a debate performance against a pathological lying sociopath.””
“For some odd reason, moderator Jake Tapper told Trump in the beginning that he didn’t need to answer the questions and that he could use the time however he wanted. Trump ran with that, essentially giving a rally speech whenever he had the floor and was unresponsive to the vast majority of the questions. He made faces and insulted Biden to his face, at one point calling him a criminal and a Manchurian candidate. If anyone had said 10 years ago that this would happen at a presidential debate they would have been laughed out of the room. After the debate when most of the country had turned off cable news or gone to bed, CNN aired its fact check. […] Even had Joe Biden been at the top of his game, he would not have been able to parry all those lies and he shouldn’t have been put in the role of being Donald Trump’s fact checker. His choice was to either ignore the lies and let them stand so he could use his time to make his own case or spend the entire debate correcting the record. It was not a fair fight. It’s obvious that Biden’s terrible performance has caused panic among Democrats and liberal pundits and analysts. The calls for him to withdraw are loud and meaningful and it’s going to be a very rough period in this campaign whatever happens. For me, this isn’t really a question. As long as Donald Trump is on the ballot, I will vote for the Democratic nominee. If it’s Biden or someone else, the calculation remains the same. Nothing is worse than another Trump administration and I suspect that at the end of the day Democratic voters will agree with that. So it’s still a matter of those undecided voters in swing states, just like it was on Thursday morning.”
CNN, yet again, gave Trump a national stage to vomit an endless
stream of unchecked lies, and today, CNN is telling itself and anyone who
will listen that the network and its moderators did a great job. That’s
just plainly false, and America is paying the price for their failure.
That doesn’t let Biden off the hook. Biden had a terrible night. He was a disaster, and his campaign should be at DefCon 1 to try and repair all the damage. I am terrified that his awful performance will obscure his surprisingly good record and leadership in the post-insurrection era, and give the political press an excuse to run with “Biden is old” in the face of Trump’s endless lies, his felony convictions, his pending trials, and all of his criminality.
I’ve seen President Biden on TV today, and even last night after the debate, where he didn’t come across as an ancient dude who needs a walker on his way to some Matlock reruns. He looks and sounds like the SOTU Biden we all expected would show up last night. I have no idea why he was so awful for 99% of the debate (the campaign says he has a cold), and I have no idea why the guy who is showing up to speak to supporters today, and who delivered the SOTU didn’t show up last night to save America from Trump, again.
But we have to live with this reality now, and I hope like hell that the Biden campaign, the candidate, and the entire Democratic party apparatus scrambles like fucking crazy to get all hands on deck to fix this, and remind voters that
This isn’t about BIden vs. Trump. This is about America vs. Project 2025.
There will be no second debate where Biden can try to salvage something out of the wreckage of this one. Trump has everything to lose and nothing
to gain. Trump will crow about how he won, and declare he has no reason to debate again, and he’s right. Biden had one shot and he absolutely blew it. The moderators did not help, but the campaign had to have known they wouldn’t, and it sure looks like they didn’t prepare Biden for what we all knew was coming. I don’t know how
those same people stop the bleeding, and if they can’t, America and the world are in
real, real trouble.
But we all have to remember that we have a choice to make in just a few months. Right now, and probably on election day, the choice is between Joe Biden and Democracy, or Donald Trump and Fascism. It’s stark, it’s clear, it’s binary, and I can not believe that it is even a question. I just hope that there are enough voters out there who will understand
that we do have a choice. The options suck, but we do have a choice.
Please choose Democracy. Please choose America. Please choose the future world our children will inherit from us.
