the Abject Obscenity of ‘Debate’ 2020
I’d only managed to watch for twenty minutes or so, but Trump would not STFU, constantly interrupting not only Biden, but moderator Chris Wallace himself, creating Joe memes such as ‘Shut up, man’, ‘Can’t you quiet this clown’, ‘Why can’t Wallace control Trump?’, etc. Yes, it was chaos, but apparently these two capitalist duopoly candidates were the best this Empire in its last throes could field.
At one point Biden had proclaimed that ‘Roe v. Wade is on the ballot’. Trump: ‘Now I have to debate the moderator on my medical plan?’
Two men’s editorials follow. I’ll know you’ll say what you saw and/or perceived. ; )
First: ‘Trump uses debate to incite fascist violence’, Joseph Kishore—SEP candidate for US president, 30 September 2020, wsws.org w/ permission, I’ll paste in most of it)
“US President Donald Trump used the platform provided by Tuesday night’s debate with Democratic candidate Joe Biden to incite fascist violence against voters and make clear that he would not accept the outcome of the election, now just over one month away.
Asked by Chris Wallace of Fox News whether he was willing “to condemn white supremacists and groups” who have instigated violence, Trump responded with a hysterical denunciation of socialism and left-wing politics and an open call for the extra-constitutional mobilization of paramilitary organizations. “Almost everything I see is from the left-wing,” he proclaimed. “Not from the right-wing.”
“Proud Boys, stand back and stand by,” Trump said, referring to a fascistic, racist and anti-Semitic organization that has terrorized protests against police violence throughout the country with armed patrols. “I’ll tell you what,” Trump added, “Somebody has to do something about Antifa and the left. This is not a right-wing problem. This is left-wing.”
Trump concluded the debate by renewing his call for supporters—that is, right-wing vigilante organizations—to monitor polling places and not accept the results of the election. “If I see tens of thousands of ballots being manipulated, I can’t go along with that,” he stated.
As polls show he is heading for a massive defeat in the popular vote, Trump is not guided by any sort of conventional electoral strategy. He is inciting as much havoc as possible, using it to lay the foundations for a violent repudiation of the election results.
In the course of the debate, Trump repeated his declaration that the election would be characterized by “fraud like you’ve never seen” and that ballots were being throw into rivers and destroyed. He added that he was “counting” on the Supreme Court to “look at the ballots” in the election, that is, that he sees the court as central in legitimizing a coup d’état.
This is the language of civil war. Trump is an out-and-out fascist who is conspiring to erect a presidential dictatorship. He is inciting violent reprisals against all those who would oppose him. If the debate made one thing clear, it is that he will not accept the outcome of the election.
The response of Biden epitomized the breakdown of the entire political system. He attempted to parry Trump’s hysterics with conventional responses whose effect was to downplay the obvious seriousness of Trump’s threats.
The Democrats have selected as their representative an aged reactionary who is unable to speak truthfully about anything. Biden’s only response to Trump’s threats of violence was to urge his supporters to vote, ignoring the fact that Trump is planning on repudiating the results. In response to the attempt by Trump to ram through the appointment to the Supreme Court of Amy Coney Barrett in an effort to pack the court ahead of a contested election, Biden declared, “I’m not opposed to the justice. She seems like a very fine person.”
The Democrats have already given up any effort to block Senate confirmation of Barrett. Biden did not even note that Barrett played a central role in the Supreme Court’s intervention in the 2000 election, which handed the presidency to George W. Bush.
In the face of Trump’s open declaration he would not accept the results of the election and calls for violence, Biden was anxious to express his commitment to accept the outcome of the ballot. “I will accept it,” Biden said, “and [Trump] will too… If it is me, in fact fine. If it is not me, I’ll support the outcome. And I will be a president not just for the Democrats; I’ll be a president for Democrats and Republicans too.”
Toward the end of the debate, when asked why voters should choose him over Trump, Biden seized on the opportunity to attack Trump for being weak on Russia, the central theme of the Democrats’ opposition to Trump for the past four years: “I’ve gone head to head with Putin and made clear we aren’t going to take any of his stuff,” Biden said. “He’s Putin’s puppy.” […]
“What happened Tuesday night was not so much a debate. It was a portrait of political degeneration. What is playing out in real time is the collapse of American democracy under all the putrefaction and filth of American capitalism.
Trump’s diatribes set the tone for an event whose degrading character shocked even the media.”
As in: “It wasn’t even a debate. It was a disgrace“, “a complete disaster on all fronts”.
Next: ‘Trump-Biden ‘debate’ full of hoaxes & emotional manipulation shows the press has failed as guardians of the American Republic’, Nebojsa Malic, Sept. 30, RT.com (several other takes are on the sidebars) sees things a bit differently and adds a bit re: Hunter Biden:
“The ninety or so minutes on Tuesday evening in Cleveland, Ohio just cannot charitably be described as civilized. There was Biden, who addressed Trump only when he wanted to insult him, but otherwise reciting prepared talking points or turning to the camera to talk to the audience directly.
There was Trump, frequently interrupting both Biden and the moderator rather than wait his turn. And there was Chris Wallace of Fox News, bending over backwards to practically squire for Biden and load questions for Trump with some of the nastiest innuendo imaginable.
To name just one example, Biden has repeatedly treated as fact the calumny that Trump called neo-Nazis “very fine people” when asked about the tragic events in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017. He did say those words – right before he condemned racists, white supremacists, neo-Nazis and the KKK in the strongest of terms. Yet Biden repeated the claim tonight and Wallace did the same. Little wonder Trump was livid. Wouldn’t you be?
That wasn’t even the lowest point of the night. As Trump repeatedly brought up a Senate report accusing Biden’s son Hunter of receiving multi-million dollar payments from Ukraine, China and Russia, Biden kept repeating that’s not true. Then he did a switcheroo, claiming Trump had instead insulted honor of his dead son Beau by calling US soldiers “losers and suckers.” […]
“Trump did not behave the way Americans have been taught a sitting president should. Instead, he acted like a journalist, peppering Biden with tough questions he never gets from the
And how could he, when the Democrat has spent the past week calling a “lid” on the press first thing in the morning? When Biden does talk to the press, they ask him what he thinks of Trump’s (supposedly rotten) soul.
It is precisely because the press has been totally derelict in its duty that Biden can assert Trump is “Putin’s puppy” (thanks, Russiagate!) or the above-mentioned Charlottesville lie, or treat the debunked stories about “Russian bounties” and Trump’s alleged disdain for US troops as proven facts, while declaring any criticism of his record or his family’s business dealings as “discredited.” The mainstream media saying so doesn’t make it so.”
(cross-posted from Café Babylon)
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Comments
My theory
and we'll have to wait for a new round of polling to verify it, is that nobody's mind was changed by this
debacledebate. There was no real chance for Trump to improve his standing with the few remaining swing voters. In a conventional pseudo-debate format Biden would have picked up a little support among undecideds as long as he managed to not look senile. The outcome would be a slightly worse situation for Trump, thus a net win by Biden.So Trump flipped the Monopoly board. Since he couldn't win, he kept Biden from winning. Trumpistas will think he did a great job, anti-Trumpistas will be horrified and rally around the other old man, and undecideds will shake their heads and wonder how it came to this. Now we know why Trump didn't bother with debate prep.
So I'm calling this a win for Trump. He didn't improve his position in the election, but he prevented Biden from improving his.
It's a rehearsal for the post election chaos. Trump knows he can't win, so he'll try to destabilize things so that he doesn't lose. Biden will bring a knife to a gun fight.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Albert Bartlett
"A species that is hurtling toward extinction has no business promoting slow incremental change." -- Caitlin Johnstone
i'll rec your thesis,
until as you say: we see if polling number spreads change. although, every poll today amounts to a push-poll (exactly which Qs are asked, internals, etc.)
loved:
from nate silver:
I'll disagree with your comment
i will take you at your word,
then. i should have said that i've never seen one that wasn't.
A question for anybody who could stomach the debate
.
Did either of those schmucks say anything about the pandemic response? Did Chris Wallace ask for them to distinguish themselves from each other?
I cried when I wrote this song. Sue me if I play too long.
spoon-feeders R us:
'The coronavirus pandemic: Full presidential debate video part 2;
President Donald Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden debate the coronavirus pandemic response during the first presidential debate of the 2020 election, cnn.com
of course it was early on; polls (ahem) claimed that was a Weak Spot for the Bloviator-in-chief.
Beyond Absurd
We need a new vocabulary to describe the unreality of American Politics.
The most immediately pressing topic in American history since the end of World War II, and the voter is given no practical understanding of why we are in a Depression and why the published numbers of "cases" continues to grow, nor any inkling of what either of these assholes would do if he wins.
There was no acknowledgement of what I learned on this board about a month ago that a vaccine cannot be expected to stop the pandemic immediately or by itself. Both contributed to the general misunderstanding that I had that the idea of the vaccine was to make you immune to the disease. Well, maybe it does and maybe it doesn't. Booster shots might be helpful at some later interval, perhaps as many as two more. The bottom line is that vaccine advocates do not claim that one can end the nightmare by itself and it is incredibly irresponsible for both of these criminals to continue feeding the fantasy of a vaccine saving the day.
There was no mention of the medical strategy itself -- to minimize personal contact in hopes of preventing the spread of infection. Minimize but not eliminate because there are essential services that require some personal contact. This contradiction within the ongoing strategy has never been analyzed or rationalized in the public discussion up to this point. Whichever asshole wins, this will not change.
Most glaring, you got no hint from either of these jerkoffs about how it will ever end.
My worst paranoid fears and conspiracy theories got a whole lot more plausible after watching that 15 minutes of bad comedy. Instead of trying to persuade voters to support their policies, they blew lip farts at each other for an hour and a half.
Fuck them and God have mercy on The United States of America.
I cried when I wrote this song. Sue me if I play too long.
you're welcome.
please pay the cashier my standard $1.99 on your way out the door....
well, as i keep suggesting, we need a term far past 'Orwellian' by now. as far as their 'covid solutions', of course both of them were talking out their asses. The Truth of the coming depression is a verboten subject, save for grand-standing theatrical bloviating.
has the Dem leadership made any serious attempts to pay citizens for lockdown poverty? it's growing and growing... 'mitch mcConnell has already said...!)
i dunno if anyone really knows (not just postulates) vaccines (and virus mutations), incubation time, recurrences even with positive antibody tests, as 'scientists say...' or even 'virologists note'...doesn't mean much given the competing Covid Wars.
i did see a study linked in the twitterverse saying that breathing the particles in the throw-away masks was a recipe for disaster.
sorry to be stream-of-consciousness again, but i'd just read that assange's hearing started again, while i'd thought baraitser has given 4 weeks for the defense to prepare for arguments, and i've been trying to catch up a bit on twitter.
but while on WL on twitter, this because UC global whistleblowers testified today:
not that bucks are the determining factor...
Pickled
Yikes! Halloween time!
Both of these two look as though they've just been wheeled in from the embalmer's!
aaaaaand...you just won
the caption contest!
and not for nothin', speaking of vaccines...RT and the gates-boJo-loving/s Twitterverse had this love fest up.
more important than global warming?
more important than the hollowing of american manufacture and the colonization of the usa?
i think not
sorry for the ee cummings, my left hand is hurting
I've seen lots of changes. What doesn't change is people. Same old hairless apes.
A fair bit of lit-crit
I just edited that passage which was indeed overwrought. "Most important" is a lousy construction to begin with -- and with Climate Change to consider, I have to agree that nothing is more important than that.
Thanks.
I cried when I wrote this song. Sue me if I play too long.
i know i'm an outlier,
but i don't. how many tipping points has the earth passed already? the only thing left, imo, to grieve, adapt, and do what you feel you must do to protect the planet's biosphere as you can. other wise, from here on out, it's all ripe for greenwashing bidnesses, #NewDealsFoNature,#WeMeanBusiness, and false efforts like this:
seen on twitter:
@Eyecatcher_Pro
There is more to life than the avoidance of death. Life is a drink with your mates. Life is a crowded football match or a day at the races.
Life is a family celebration with children and grandchildren. Life is companionship, an arm around one’s back, laughter or tears shared...
We did not lose in Vietnam. It was a tie!
Climate change might kill everything. The pandemic and our perverse response to it might kill everything. If it matters which is worse, I abstain.
I cried when I wrote this song. Sue me if I play too long.
Yes we did
An absolute rout, dumping helicopters overboard to make way for more evacuees. Not an orderly retreat. Beaten badly, like a redheaded stepchild, to use an expression of an old Navy buddy.
COVID mortality is ho-hum unless you or someone who matters to you dies. 1918 flu was much worse.
Funny that I never hear about politicians dying.
I've seen lots of changes. What doesn't change is people. Same old hairless apes.
Not a fan of A Fish Called Wanda?
That line about a tie was from Kevin Kline and it was hilarious in the movie. Of course we got thrown out of Vietnam, with extreme prejudice. Please forgive my far fetched parallel references. I call it a style. Opinions differ on how amusing it is.
.
Regarding what is THE most important issue -- it was dumb of me to use the formulation in the first place.
I cried when I wrote this song. Sue me if I play too long.
Oh, no I never saw it
I know it was very popular. Not dumb of you at all. Maybe quote marks would have helped.
I've seen lots of changes. What doesn't change is people. Same old hairless apes.
I graduated from the Air Force Academy in 1980s.
"I’m a human being, first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.” —Malcolm X
And now for something completely different...
Americans rush to Google after unwatchable debate
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Albert Bartlett
"A species that is hurtling toward extinction has no business promoting slow incremental change." -- Caitlin Johnstone
ROTFLMAO!
what took them so long?
I wasn't sure whether this was a conventional source, or
If they can't spell Canada,
I say again: these two assholes are but a symptom of all that is wrong with the US.
"Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now..."
Already building
This is actually a still from the "Icky Thump" video by the White Stripes, circa 2007. Pretty funny old video. Yes, Mexicans are shown building a Great Wall to keep the gringos outta there. Can't blame them...
So sick of this BS
Dems want to claim that Trump will not leave office. All I ever heard is that he will not concede?
That's different from refusing to step down when the EC votes. I wouldn't concede either as long as their was a ghost of a chance. Bernie sanders concedes before he's asked to. It's all personality.
AND GODDAMNED SICK OF RUSSIAGATE/PUTIN PUPPET BULLSHIT! Makes we want to vote for the Orange Baboon as the lesser evil.
I've seen lots of changes. What doesn't change is people. Same old hairless apes.
orange baboon.
Only a fool lets someone else tell him who his enemy is. Assata Shakur
i hear that!
as that whopper of a (someone) studebaker epistle snoopy dawg had hoped we'd read to BUST the notion once and for all, he'd said one thing that resonated: 'it depends on who the military will support, and DT's generals hate him, and will not support him. i'd added that the police would also count, and had hoped to add to it via something allegedly at the NY/CIA Slimes via wsws, which was why Biden is/was more sanguine about it all.
longer story than i have time for now.
read a confusing report on the Durham investigation at sputnik last week, and had almost PMed to another member or two to...decode.
ha!
this was the gist of the sputnik article!
Ah! NOW we know why dumping Trump is a must for the DNC
I've seen lots of changes. What doesn't change is people. Same old hairless apes.
it took me a while
to process that, but would you be meaning, for instance, that the clinto foundation would be pouring mass amounts of their filthy lucre into Biden/Kopmala?
anyhoo, here's the NYT piece: 'At Pentagon, Fears Grow That Trump Will Pull Military Into Election Unrest; Defense Department officials said top generals could resign if Mr. Trump ordered the active-duty military into the streets to quell protests', sept 25
same wsws column had quoted dementia joe on MSNBC's stephanie ruhle (never heard of you, and i can't find the video) as saying that if elected his message to vladamir putin is: "I'm coming for you", etc.
To protect HRC from prosecution! n/t
I've seen lots of changes. What doesn't change is people. Same old hairless apes.
good-o, then.
; )
I stopped watching several minutes into it.
Have no idea who won or lost or if votes were changed. I am not voting for either of them so no matter. Neither will do anything to help Americans (unless they are rich) out of the economic depression and pandemic. My main reaction is to stock up on food supplies in October as Nov., Dec., and Jan will be political chaos.
About sums it up:
[VIDEO:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8172nw3beQ]
i understand completely.
i'll vote green again for the fifth time. yanno: 'waste my vote'. ; )
but ye, this time the post-election Chaos is predicted to be worse than ever.
Trump May be feeling his oats with new DNI letter
I expect we will hear more on this subject in debate #2, assuming there is one. “Russiagate” is on the ropes with this declassification.
H/T MOA
“ …and when we destroy nature, we diminish our capacity to sense the divine,and understand who God is, and what our own potential is and duties are as human beings.- RFK jr. 8/26/2024
just might be so, eh?
‘Hillary Clinton cooked up Russiagate to smear Trump & distract from her own scandals, declassified docs suggest’, 29 Sep, 2020 , RT.com
and earlier...
love your gurdjieff quote, by the way. and gurdjieff.
Sounds like proof that HRC creayed a lie to cover her own
illegal use of government resources for personal and political gain.
She is lucky that Trump has not arrested her. But since Trump's campaign was started by a suggestion from Bill, maybe the three of them are in cahoots.
I've seen lots of changes. What doesn't change is people. Same old hairless apes.
Isn't that special?
Perfection -- Russian spooks dream up Russiagate. American spooks tumble to the proposed scam for Hillary and brief Obama about the unhatched plot. Word gets to Hillary about how she can blame losing to Trump on Russia. Hillary loses and now Russiagate is an Article of Faith for all true blues.
I cried when I wrote this song. Sue me if I play too long.
That would be a literal reading
My take is that the excerpts were put in writing (point #1 formally and point #2 hand-writen and therefore, informal) as CYA for Brennan who was knee deep in this crap but legally couldn't have chats with Obama about a smear Trump with a hoax effort unless it was in the foreign policy arena.
Further, by late July 2016, the whole world knew 1) that the DP/DNC blamed Russia-Putin for the exfiltration of DNC files 2) Clinton was expected to win in November and 3) Clinton loathed Putin. Still ... have to think further on Brennan's phrasing.
Here we go:
Patrick Lawrence July 25, 2016: "Shades of the Cold War: How the DNC fabricated a Russian hacker conspiracy to deflect blame for its email scandal." This IC declassification stinks of Cold War shenanigans, but in real time it didn't appear to be coming from the IC, but strictly from the Clinton/DNC campaign:
How the US IC got from feeding the Clinton campaign that Russia had stolen the emails and did so to help DJT, to the 'late July 2016' gobbledygook in the declassified DNI letter is undefined. There's a layer here that only professional spooks would understand. IOW why would the US undertake any action based on: US IC 'assessed' that based on Robby Mook's public statements, Russian IC 'assessed' that team Clinton was promulgating a hoax to tie Trump to Russia and the DNC emails?
DNC should never have had those classified e-mails
No "need to know" and HRC violated the rules for handling classidfied information.
IMHO, she deserves at least a five year sentence for perjury when she (as all other handlers of classified info) signed an oath on paper subject to penalty of perjury to follow those rules. You better beleive that if I had set up a private server serving the secret e-mails that I had access to (no, I didn't have top secret clearance like Her) that I would be rotting in a federal pen.
EDIT: No, e-mail hadn't been invented then, just access to memos, letters, and telegrams. Fast forward twenty years and I would have had e-mails. Except that our whole office was apparently "privatized".
I've seen lots of changes. What doesn't change is people. Same old hairless apes.
The DNC never had Clinton's SoS emails
The DNC files, that included e-mails but none to or from HRC, and were hardly a complete cache of everything on its server(s), were taken and published by Wikileaks with the exception of whatever Guccifer2 posted. iirc, Assange said there was no reason for them to duplicate documents already on line. Not sure if he added that the G2 documents weren't all the interesting anyway. These communications documented that the DNC had "fixed" the primary for HRC.
The subject third batch of emails were the Podesta files. These were published by Wikileaks in October 2016.
Assange has maintained that they do not publish documents obtained through hacking. Only documents one of more of their whistleblower had legal access to. However, it's never been clear to me if Wikileaks includes phising in the definition of hack and it's widely accepted that the Podesta files were secured through phishing. I have doubts about that and suspect that the phishing was done to cover the person's trail. He or she was careful to submit emails to Wikileaks that could have been obtained during the brief opening obtained by phising. However, and I could be wrong, there was at least one email that was beyond that time window.
I didn't watch it
My only question: Was Joe's dementia apparent, or did he somehow manage to at least look like his brain was functional in a strictly medical sense?
In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.
Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!
sigh; i'll drop this in
for the second time:
'The coronavirus pandemic: Full presidential debate video part 2;
President Donald Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden debate the coronavirus pandemic response during the first presidential debate of the 2020 election, cnn.com
on edit: you decide.
I didn’t watch.
I’ve seen “highlights” today. It seems to have gone about as well as I expected. Joe didn’t reboot mid-thought or lose his dentures so of course he “won” in the eyes of the media. Trump is all bully and bluster and, most importantly, he’s lost his ability to throw a funny zinger once in a while. However, he seemed to be running the show. Does it mean anything? Who knows?
Since this is all about Trump, I still think his game is to shore up his supporters and depress Biden’s. To that end, getting Biden on camera again to shit on the left is a good move. (“And I will be a president not just for the Democrats; I’ll be a president for Democrats and Republicans too.” after saying he beat the hell out of Sanders and crapping all over the left’s policies?) Biden needs to get Sanders voters out and Trump needs to remind them Biden isn’t on their side. (And it’s irrelevant that neither is Trump.)
As for the rest, who cares? Is anyone’s mind really going to be changed by that?
Idolizing a politician is like believing the stripper really likes you.
love it:
the Camel as Prez? ; )
Am I the only one
who remembers that it was Hillary and the Democraps who started talking (without using the words)about armed insurrection in the second week of November 2016?
It really is about what he says, not what he does, since after all what he does is not truly different from what the Democrats do. Bernie is half right - any President would be "the most dangerous president in history."
On to Biden since 1973
others may remember it,
but i don't. but do you mean 'bernie' or 'biden'...?
i can't imagine anyone wanting to be President, much less of this capitalist #ShitHole nation, and that applying for the job should be a danger signal and require extensive psych evals, much lke police applicants should undergo.
but i did finally manage to find dementia joe's "message to Putin" during an msdnc interview. duh: check youtube directly! (i've tried to cue it up right)
[video:https://youtu.be/rEcEfxHlhRM?t=201]
Is it pointless to ask,
of the claimers that Putin is interfering in the election, what does that interference consist of?
Is Putin placing false information on the internet that Biden is corrupt? Is he placing false information about Biden's votes in Congress? Is Putin telling us Biden told an African American man that, "you ain't black" because the man didn't support him? It's on Youtube. Is Putin manipulating Youtube?
What exactly is Putin supposed to be doing? It doesn't seem to matter. The assertion that Putin is causing any criticism of Biden is enough to fog any and all discussion of the issues.
(smile)
RT.com had a piece up the other day that said that Putin told the US that he (or was it russians?) wouldn't interfere in your elections...if the US didn't interfere in theirs. you could see his eyes twinkling behind the text.
it's just too hard for joe and the Ds to give up, i guess. did it sound like joe were threatening war? i reckon i'd thought so.
but even back in the day
russia was accused of placing 435 facebook ads against clinton! OMG! or some such goofiness i've forgotten. but then, with wikiLeaks having published the CIA vault 7, we now know that the CIA is able to obscure the country of origin and language from whence it allegedly came.
i'd tried to memorize which of the exploits showed that, but i read myself purple again without seeing it.
What I've noticed in the last weeks
are odd changes in DT's face. It appears to be both widening and sagging, spreading loosely and collapsing.
The $23K for hair care doesn't seem to be working either.
i've only watched him
twice, for this and a few brief moments of the R convention. but i'd thought his hair isn't as red as it used to be, but what gives me the SHIVERS is the way he sticks out his lips in a square megaphone shape as he bellows. ewwwwwww.
a bit OT, but just in case anyone's still reading,
it's not only Oct. 1, but la luna bella is full and glorious with mars bright orange nearby...
and today is also the black alliance for peace's: Day of Action in Africa: #Shut Down Africom!
the endorsing organizations are on the left sidebar, at the bottom right is:
click here leads to their demands and a petition to sign.
a few passages from their demands: