The big news leading up to the next presidential debate was that not only did Liz Cheney (former Republican Congresswoman of Colorado) announce last week that yes, she was voting for Kamala Harris, she said on Friday that her Dad, Dick Cheney, was voting for Harris too. Which seems like a big deal, given that the Cheneys are so conservative that they kinda started the Iraq War and everything. But I am reminded of when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill immediately urged Parliament to send military aid to Stalin, his political arch enemy. And when asked why, Churchill said, “If Hitler invaded Hell, I would at least put in a good word for the Devil in the House of Commons.”
That’s where we are now. Not that I am comparing Trump to Hitler. Hitler at least had an infrastructure program.
On one level, this is meaningless, just as Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr. endorsing Trump is meaningless, because just as those two represent the kind of Democrats whom the Democratic Party as a whole has rejected, the Cheneys are the kind of Republicans whom their party has rejected. But this is less a matter of “conservatism” (whatever that means) and more loyalty to the Mob Boss. And the Cheney endorsement just goes to show that leading up to this debate, whatever one thinks of the two parties, only one of them actually IS a political party. However dysfunctional and feckless the Democrats are, they at least think they’re supposed to be running a government. Whereas the Republicans are a combination Mafia family and religious cult that believes in leeching the taxpayer for all they can get while worshiping a criminal as God.
And if you want to play both sides-ism, both of these parties started off with a presidential candidate who is clearly too old to compete, but the Democrats actually acknowledged that in their case. And not only is Trump completely unqualified on a performance level, he has disqualified himself with his criminal activities to stop the 2020 election result, not to mention his hoarding of classified documents since leaving office, a point that neither Republicans nor the “liberal” media will emphasize.
And since the Trump Party IS a Mob, and have already announced that they’re going to try and interfere with election results, the best way for Kamala Harris and Democrats to win is to do what Joe Biden did in 2020: Win enough states by big enough margins that Republicans can’t steal enough elections to change the outcome.
And as with the DNC, which certainly pumped up the Democrats but doesn’t seem to have created much momentum in the polls, Democrats were looking at the debate as a means of shifting the momentum, whereas with all the advantages Trump has – namely a “news” media that wants a demented goon back in the White House cause he’s “great for ratings” – all Trump really needed to do was hang on and hope that his blind-faith cult can carry him the rest of the way.
Well, as Trump would say, “We’ll see what happens.”
Keep in mind, I only got to check so much of the debate in real time because I work at home, at night, and I was taking calls. But I noticed a couple things. Most of the people calling customer service had the debate on, which I could hear on their line while I was watching with the sound off. The other thing I noticed is that we weren’t getting quite as many calls as we usually do on a Tuesday evening. Of course as soon as the debate was over, every property in the United States suddenly started having emergencies again.
Just as well that I couldn’t hear most of it. I am not a fan of Harris’ voice, and even less a fan of Trump’s whiny-Mafioso-with-sleep-apnea voice. So as with Kennedy vs. Nixon, the visuals are everything. And the main visual I got watching this on TV was Trump on the left going off while on the right Harris was watching with an actively bemused, trying-not-to-laugh expression on her face, like you might have if your friend invited you to their house and you watched their four-year-old child try to recite Gilbert and Sullivan. Much more pleasant than watching Trump on the left as he Gish Galloped across the Pecos while Biden stood there wondering what the hell he was seeing, let alone Trump’s reactions to Harris, which were basically a sulky little boy hoping that if he frowned hard enough his stare could break a hole in a mountainside. That is, when he wasn’t rolling his eyes and pursing his lips in contempt, or grinning like a toad who’d just been given a lobotomy.
Not that the moderators didn’t ask questions that could challenge the Biden-Harris Administration. But you know what? She answered them. In regard to the Biden Afghanistan pullout, she pointed out that it was Trump himself who made the plans with the Taliban in 2020, bypassing the Afghan government. And as much as Trump hammered on immigration, and “border czar” and all that, she pointed out that there was a border bill written by a Republican that he told his Party to kill. And in regard to immigration, Trump repeated the racist-as-fuck story that Haitian immigrants in some communities were eating people’s dogs, which running mate JD Vance has also spread. In response, ABC news anchor David Muir said ABC did reach out to the city manager in Springfield and confirmed they had no such reports.
Co-moderator Linsey Davis also fact-checked Trump, noting that “there is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it is born.”
BREAKING NEWS: JOURNALISTS ACTUALLY DID THEIR JOBS
And when the debate turned to climate change, Trump blamed Harris and Biden for taking money from Ukraine.
Which only goes to show that Trump has his invincible bond with his voter base because he IS his voter: A belligerent dumbass who parrots any conspiracy theory you feed him cause he can be exploited by con men that much more evil than he is.
It went further. On the subject of Ukraine, Harris said “Putin would be sitting in Kyiv with his eyes on the rest of Europe. Starting with Poland. And why don’t you tell the 800,000 Polish Americans right here in Pennsylvania how quickly you would give up for the sake of favor and what you think is a friendship with what is known to be a dictator who would eat you for lunch.” She also said earlier, “And it is absolutely well known that these dictators and autocrats are rooting for you to be president again because they’re so clear, they can manipulate you with flattery and favors.” Trump later said, “Viktor Orban, one of the most respected men — they call him a strong man. He’s a tough person. Smart. Prime Minister of Hungary. They said why is the whole world blowing up? Three years ago it wasn’t. Why is it blowing up? He said because you need Trump back as president. They were afraid of him. China was afraid. And I don’t like to use the word afraid but I’m just quoting him. China was afraid of him. North Korea was afraid of him.”
Kinda proves her point, don’t it?
And Harris also said in regard to world leaders, “And that is why so many military leaders who you have worked with have told me you are a disgrace.”
Well, he IS a disgrace. Just this week, he continued to insist that he’d never met E. Jean Carroll, refusing to say her name, while also going into extensive detail about the number of times they’d met. He also denied guilt in her sexual assault case, saying “she would not have been The Chosen One.” At the press conference, he also had two of his lawyers flanking them while he said, “I’m disappointed in my legal talent, I’ll be honest with you.”
It’s like he was designed in a lab to be the most disgusting humanoid imaginable. I mean, Lenin and Hitler would look at him and go, “DUDE.”
And just after the debate, Taylor Swift posted on Instagram, announcing that she was endorsing Harris, because we need “calm instead of chaos.” She signed it “Taylor Swift Childless Cat Lady.”
Now here’s the real fight: Trump vs. Swift.
One is an Aryan tycoon with millions of fanatic worshipers who will kill you for disrespecting their idol. The other is Trump.
So, that’s it, then. It’s over.
I mean, it shouldn’t be that simple, but it probably is.
But then again: It should have been over in 20 fucking 16 after the Access Hollywood tape. It should have been over when Trump tried to kill his own Republican Congress on January 6, 2021 cause not enough of them would go along with his election steal. They all fluttered, and huffed, and then they all took Trump’s side in impeachment, and came crawling back to their Master anyway.
What else are they going to do?
Voters, Republican voters in particular, are like football fans. Everyone’s got their team. And as I’ve said before, it’s like if you’re a Dallas Cowboys fan from back in the glory days, and then Jerry Jones bought the team, and the very first thing he did was to fire Tom Landry, and every rotten thing that’s happened to that team since stems directly from that decision, but what’re ya gonna do, quit being a Cowboys fan?
And a lot of it is also “moderates” who want an alternative to the “socialist” party that’s raised inflation everywhere, but then who’s going to be the alternative to the alternative when the Republican cure for social democracy is a lot worse than the disease?
We are never going to be rid of these two parties because, for one thing, they need each other for their suckers to have someone to vote against. Also, no matter how dysfunctional one party becomes, its formal collapse would mean that there’s only one national party in this country, and that’s really not feasible. But what that means for the moment and the foreseeable future is that the Republican Party will just continue to deteriorate without dying because there will always be a need for an alternative to the Democrats, no matter how broken and evil it is.
The only way to get out of this trap is to break people of their football-team loyalty to party and de-emphasize parties in the election system, just as they have largely ceased to exist as governing bodies against their own politicians. You need things like open primaries and ranked choice voting. This ought to be damn obvious by now, and yet certain people don’t want their little system to change. And there’s a particular example of this that I will deal with in my next column.