October 2, 2020
Dear Everyone:
Yes, great-great-grandchildren (if I had any),
I did see the Horrifying-and-Possibly-Only Presidential Debate of 2020.
It was a wonderful sight to behold.
Certainly, I sat there wondering:
How could it go so wrong so quickly?
And wondering: Could
it possibly get any worse?
And yes, it did.
Ever watch Saturday Night Wrestling?
Well, this was an oral version of that.
Afterward, some people desperately searched
through their collective thesauri looking for words to adequately
describe …”an embarrassing debacle…”
That was putting it kindly.
I’m sure you’ve seen a real debate.
The Rules are clearly proclaimed ahead of time.
Both Candidates agree to follow the Rules.
The Moderator asks a probing question.
Candidate A has a set amount of time to respond.
Then Candidate B has an equal amount of time to rebut.
Then Candidate A is allowed to rebut the rebuttal, and so on.
All very polite and civilized.
But this was not a Real Debate.
This was “a storm inside a dumpster fire inside a train wreck.”
And all because of one person:
Donald J Trump.
This was Donald, unleashed, running around in
circles to avoid answering even one question.
The first thing he did was to throw the Rules
to the floor and stomp on them.
Then he started breaking everything in sight.
It was like watching a petulant five-year-old who was losing at “Chutes
and Ladders” throwing the board across the room.
He was constantly interrupting his Worthy
Opponent, interrupting the Hapless Moderator, interrupting Himself.
He seemed incapable of uttering a complete sentence.
It was, in essence, 90 minutes of Trump’s verbal diarrhea.
Even when the Moderator gave him such an easy
question that it was the oratory equivalent of a volleyball setup to
spike the answer, Trump couldn’t do it.
Given the opportunity to tell all White
Supremacy groups to “stand down and shut up!”, Trump pronounced:
“Stand back and stand by”.
Which could simply mean he doesn’t know his prepositions.
While Trump likes to make broad, generalized
statements, as soon as someone starts pinning him down, he demands
specifics (“Name a group”), then declares that he knows nothing about
that specific group or individual.
During his first campaign, when asked about the
KKK endorsing him, he insisted: “I don’t know anything about David Duke;
I’ve never met him.”
This time, he made a lukewarm “condemnation” of
violent extremist groups, but quickly added, like a schoolyard combatant
(“They started it!”), that “somebody has to do something about those
‘antifa’ and other radical leftists…”
The simple fact of the matter is that Trump
wants to avoid alienating White Supremacists for two basic reasons.
1) He agrees with them.
2) He needs their collective votes.
He doesn’t want to “lose” his imaginary army of adherents.
Consequently, he remains firmly entrenched in
ambiguity.
Did he succeed in luring any undecided voters
over to his side? Probably
not.
Is anyone still talking about Trump’s financial
records? Not so much.
Mission Accomplished, as far as Trump is
concerned.
As for me, in going through my alphabetical
list of “Words to Describe Donald Trump” (Arrogant, Bully, Coward…), I
may have to replace “Bully” with “Babbling” and “Deceitful” (“That man
has more deceit in his little finger than most people have in their
entire bodies”) with “Deranged”.
Other than that, it’s Business as Usual in
Washington, D.C.
Love, as always,
Pete
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