9/30/20
Yours truly surely would not have conducted myself the way President
Trump did last night in his first debate with former Vice-President Joe
Biden.
I wouldn’t have attempted to convey strength by attempting
to dominate the conversation by constantly interrupting Mr. Biden in mid-sentence. Not only would avoiding such interruptions
been the more gentlemanly thing to do, it would have given Mr. Biden more time
to commit the verbal gaffes and tormented twists of logic to which he is
naturally occasionally prone. Also, such interruptions and verbal bullying do
not convey strength, but, rather, the insecurity of a petulant child. By engaging in such conduct, Mr. Trump looked
weak rather than strong.
Yours truly also wouldn’t have attacked Mr. Biden’s intelligence
and academic achievements. Belittling
Mr. Biden’s alma mater, be it the University of Delaware or, as
Trump put it, perhaps in an attempt to highlight a previous Biden gaffe, Delaware
State, sounds awfully elitist from a Wharton graduate whose ostensible
main reason for political existence is to be the candidate of the common
man. And attacking Mr. Biden’s
intelligence just sounds outright silly coming from a guy whose most salient
feature is not his towering intellect.
Incidentally, yours truly has been blessed with, among many other
things, the opportunity to know and learn from many extremely smart people. One of the most intelligent and successful of
those, who, in what is surely no coincidence, is a near religious reader of
this blog, is a proud graduate of the University of Delaware. But I digress.
I also would have been more subtle in attacking the shady business
dealings of Mr. Biden’s son Hunter and I would have placed less emphasis
on the actual shenanigans, or worse, in which young Mr. Biden has been involved
and more on the insouciant attitude of his father who has repeatedly contended
that “My son has done nothing wrong.”
Yes, Hunter’s actions at the very least constitute conflict of interest
and quite possibly worse. But Joe’s contention
that Hunter did nothing wrong says a lot about what Mr. Biden’s forty-seven
years of “public life” do to someone’s judgment regarding right and wrong and
such things as entitlement. That is
where the focus should be when discussing the reprehensible behavior of Hunter
Biden.
All that having been written, though, I am not Donald
Trump, and the contrast goes further than Mr. Trump’s being president of the
United States and, unless the New York Times is right, a
successful real estate/entertainment/gaming tycoon while yours truly is a man
of (very) modest accomplishment who makes a moderately comfortable living
teaching an occasional class, making some wise investments, pulling off a good
trade now and then, and collecting a few royalty checks on my books. Simply put, people, whether they love or
hate Mr. Trump, do not expect him to be anything resembling a gentleman; such a
characterization is simply not in his character. People
insisting on a gentleman president do not support Donald Trump. And those who support Donald Trump would be
confounded, and probably more than a little disappointed, were he to comport himself
in the style of, say, yours truly. So, yes,
Mr. Trump’s performance last night was over-the-top, and, unlike his political
rallies, in which Mr. Trump resembles nothing so much as a borscht belt comedian,
didn’t even make me smile, to use the words of a great Sinatra tune. It was a sorry performance, but, given who
Mr. Trump is, didn’t shock anybody.
I would also be quick to note that Mr. Biden did not
cover himself in glory by any stretch of even the most febrile
imagination. He called Mr. Trump a “clown”
and a “racist” and told him to “shut up, man.” In a particular favorite of the left, he
accused Mr. Trump of repeatedly using “dog whistles.” While Mr. Biden cleared the ridiculously
low bar Mr. Trump had foolishly set for him, he did commit his share of
suspicion feeding gaps, as when he repeatedly bumbled the number of COVID
deaths in this country and, after finally settling on approximately the right
number, 200,000, asked how many of those victims survived. If Mr. Trump and his supporters had not
conditioned people to expect Mr. Biden to drool, wretch, mumble, and mutter, much
more would have been made of such bumbling.
More importantly, Mr. Trump accomplished two things he
set out to accomplish. He realized that
this debate was going to change few minds if for no other reason that there are
few minds out there to change. The purpose of this debate was not to charm
the, depending on who’s counting, the 5%, 7%, or 8% of the electorate that is
undecided in this contest. The purpose
of this debate, on both sides, was to fire up the base. Mr. Trump succeeded in that endeavor. By continually hitting the main points of
his argument for re-election, and tossing in plenty of red meat, Mr. Trump
surely got the base revved up. That he
made those of us who were already not counting our upcoming vote for Mr. Trump
as among our lives’ finest choices even more unsettled about supporting this
man is of little consequence; even we are still going to vote for the guy or,
more properly, against his opponents.
Most importantly, and far more subtly, Mr. Trump did
something very clever last night and probably did so unwittingly. Joe Biden has been given something of a free
pass this entire campaign, and not only by the mainstream media who really
ought to formally give up the transparent as glass masquerade that they are
somehow unbiased reporters of the news, certainly regarding this campaign. What I am addressing here is Mr. Biden’s heretofore
ability to rest on his questionable reputation as a moderate while remaining more
or less committed to the agenda items of those on his party’s far left. So far, he has masterfully walked that tightrope,
persuading moderate suburban voters that they are safe in expressing their visceral
hatred of Mr. Trump by casting a vote for him while assuring the woke wackos
in his party that he will carry their revolution to Washington and, from there,
to the entire benighted country that so badly needs the wisdom of a group of
malcontents who lack even the most basic understanding of how this country
achieved the abundance of wealth and wisdom that enables it to indulge their
inane silliness.
Even if Mr. Trump didn’t knock Mr. Biden off that
tightrope last night, he certainly made Mr. Biden stumble. Despite Mr. Trump’s misplaced observation
that “He just lost the left,” Mr. Biden did the exact opposite. By repeating that Antifa is an idea
rather than an organization, being unable to name one police organization that
supports him, being unable to even say “the word (sic) law enforcement,” as Mr.
Trump put it, and refusing to rule out packing the Supreme Court, Mr. Biden
made it increasingly clear that his reputation as a moderate is a vestige of a
past that may itself be the victim of selective memory. If anybody missed this last night, believe
me, they will be repeatedly reminded of Mr. Biden’s leap (or maybe a baby-step,
really) to the left between now and election day. The main effect of Mr. Biden’s more firmly
placing himself in solidarity with, if not outright membership in or obeisance
to, the left of his party will be to fire up Mr. Trump’s base by alerting them
to the dangers of a nominal Biden presidency. It will also keep those of us who are not
the least bit happy about having to vote for Mr. Trump in the President’s camp.
Finally, after the debate, yours truly went back and
forth between CNN and Fox News for post-debate commentary. I thought for a moment that I was visiting two
different planets, or at least an episode of The Twilight Zone
featuring two dimensions of the same planet.
The people on CNN were, as is their wont, hysterical, discoursing
endlessly on the decency and nobility of Joe Biden and the utter evil that is
Donald Trump and spinning tales of children crying and fleeing from the rooms
in which the debate was being broadcast in response the ugliness of the depths
to which their “democracy” had sunk. Though they had a few more reasoned voices on
their panels, the heavyweights on Fox were equally as hysterical, though, of
course, on the complete opposite side of the continuum, declaring that Mr.
Trump had steamrolled Mr. Biden and made his country proud. Sean Hannity repeatedly declared that he
liked the open brawling of the debate and that the next debate should dispense
completely with the moderator and let the candidates have at it because, after
all, Americans like a good brawl. He
sounded like Bob Luce promoting a Dick the Bruiser/Johnny Valentine
Texas Death Match. While yours
truly always enjoyed such matches, which, curiously, never ended with anybody’s
death and were not held in Texas, we are deciding on a president here. Further, this was the commentary from CNN
and Fox; one can only imagine the maniacal ravings that must have emanated from
such outfits as OAN and MSNBC.
There really is nowhere to go any more for news; all that
remains is opinion, sometimes masquerading as news, sometimes not. And the opinion business is getting awfully
crowded. And the country is in trouble.
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