Wednesday, June 26, 2024

Thursday Debate

Whether this will be a debate is debatable. Trump can’t complete a thought and Biden has trouble completing a sentence. The TV audience is likely to reach seventy million but that’s just a fraction of the eyes on the last Super Bowl. That, alone, speaks volumes.  

Neither a sport nor a disputation of the red / blue divide, this promises to be a spectacle of political theater. I’ll be ready to cringe if the President meanders off into rhetorical fog.

At the same time, I’ll be anticipating Trump to employ his nine-year-old vocabulary of limp curses as he rants incoherently. One wonders what dose of vulgarity and malice it would take to dissuade a MAGA mind.

As always, The Democrats have a large tent with many constituencies. It would be nothing less than tragic if they will not all support the President in November. He has done a remarkable job pushing through an economic program which benefits the disadvantaged. It is ironic that the aggrieved do not see it. And ironic, too, that we do not have a youthful, vigorous candidate to convey the message. 

The phenomenon we are witnessing is an amorphous discontent being manipulated by a semi-deranged miscreant. His megalomania seems to obscure the emptiness of any remedy for his follower’s grievances. Those who know better salivate over his proposed anti-regulation and tax giveaway. History will judge them harshly for abetting his climate denialism and for their complicity in installing a man who promises to end democracy.

All these words fall on deaf ears in this theater of the absurd. The demotic force of social media has replaced thoughtful, investigative journalism. We have created a massive class of the ill-informed.

How many minds will be moved by the force of either man's case, I expect it to be minimal. Instead we’ll be looking for lapses, incoherence and gotchas.

 

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