Some Notes on the Not-so-Great debate
As we approach the end game–perhaps only the beginning of the end game–I’m finding it more and more difficult to write about it. What awaits us is incomprehensible: one man, one psychopathic narcissist with almost no talent for anything other than destruction, has brought an entire nation, perhaps an entire way of life over large portions of the planet, to the brink of total loss.
I must admit that I have no time for the persons who remind us, quite accurately, that the way of life that is on the brink has at times been hideously flawed. What has to be acknowledged over and over, though, is that way of life is “democracy;” that it has been practiced more successfully for longer in the United States than anywhere else; and that, as Winston Churchill famously remarked: “Democracy is the worst form of government–except for all the others.”
At this moment I recall my parents’ best friends, a couple from Europe: he, a one-time delegate to the Comintern (from Hungary, I think); she, a refugee first from Communism and then from Naziism. I was going on angrily about some breach of civil liberties in, ugh, The United States; and she interrupted me finally to say, “Philip you just don’t understand what you have escaped, living here, what you have always had.” Indeed.
With that caution in mind, I just want to add one thing before proceeding any further: Donald Trump is not the worst thing that’s happened to the nation; the lure of absolute power is what always attracts the genuine psychopath, a Jeffrey Dahmer in the world of politics.
No, the worst thing is the take-over of human beings — -“ Americans,” to speak only of us–out of some movie: “e.g.,“The Invasion of the Body-Snatchers,” or “The Puppet Masters.” The millions who buy into, or accept, or willfully ignore, his depradations; not to mention the corruption beyond all accounting of a political party that’s almost two centuries old–and began in opposition to a slavery that he promises to emulate; who even deepen the rhetorical filth he offers with their Internet violence and hatreds and lies.
So I have to give up trying to account for them, the inequalities that arouse them (J.D. Vance, Marjorie Taylor Greene, John Kennedy–why bother?), the resentments that lead to “explanations” by the likes of Thomas Edsall or David Brooks. Forget all that: they are who they are. With no excuse for their acceptance of inhumanity.
All that said, then, there was a Debate, and it illustrated everything that is sick in the contemporary media, and laid gold bricks on the road to our demise.
Before that, one further note about the polls: pay them a little mind, but ignore all references to a supposed “margin of error.” This phrase passes as a statistical construct, but it is not. Rather it’s generated by the possibility–not statistical but political–that pollsters, especially those with fewer respondents, have failed to take all the possible background factors–gender, race, occupation, educations, etc. etc. etc.–into correct account as they overlap with each other and “intersectionality” describes the population’s demographics.
The only descriptions that at least somewhat account for what is happening at any moment are, first, “Simulations”; that is to say computer-generated outputs of all the polls that have been fed into it, and which thereby, and hopefully, cancel each other’s omissions and exaggerations,
All of the simulations that have so far been publicly reported showed the same or similar results: Harris wins in every one, by margins ranging from 55–44, to 59–42. Those are not voting margins, they are rather the number of simulations per one hundred or better yet one thousand, that have come out with one or another winner-at the moment, all favoring Harris, but only one will actually happen: and too many damn chances it will be the wrong one.
Moreover, one other aspect of the race tells a meaningful tale: that is the direction of the various polls, and on this ground Trump is gaining. But enough of that. On to the Debate:
To paraphrase the oldie but goodie Stan Kenton song, “And her tears flowed like wine,” — “And his lies flowed like wine.”
But not without a great boost from the CBS frauds. Donnelly amd Brennan. Just doing what the media always do. I’ll give a million dollars to the first person who can explain to me what Walz’s putative lie about whether he was at Tienanman Square had to do with an alleged “debate?” The couple of occasions on which the questioners corrected misrepresentations of actual data–as they were not supposed to do?–wouldn’t begin to make up for the gratuitous and irrelevant and one-sided nastiness with which the wretched Margaret Brennan began the evening.
If at all, it was it not meant to precede the dozens of flat-out lies that Vance floated out about the economy and immigration and anything else that came to his attention: together with his charming defense that it’s OK to lie–and up to the media to investigate it? And when Vance took more than two minutes s to rant his suavely total bullshit about the state of the economy, before even giving Walz a chance to say excuse me, the two of them floated their way into some completely irrelevant topic and let every second of that disinformation stand without a word of “debate?” What is the Circle of the Inferno into which “panders” are thrown? I don’t have the energy to look it up.
So, the lies:
1. The Lies
These are just two, from a post-Debate fact-checker:
Vance greatly misstated Haitians’ immigration status, and the number of undocumented immigrants in the country, not to mention their contribution to their economy way beyond the small degree to which the often essential work they engage in–such as the nationwide system of medical care that would collapse without their presence.
As Jamelle Bouie put it, ” a mass deportation plan designed to expel 13.3 million undocumented immigrants over about 10 years would crash the economy, immiserate millions of Americans and siphon nearly $1 trillion from the federal government.” And he doesn’t even mention the millions of deaths that would occur at the guns of an unleashed military. This is a policy that might have been cheerfully created by John Wayne Gracy.
At the same time, Vance’s suggestion that Trump worked to improve Obamacare –the program that Trump tried time and again to cut, and would have succeeded except for John McCains’s demonstration of human decency–goes beyond disinformation into the backwards world that Alice discovered.
These are not inconsequential lies; though in some way the worst of them all was the claim, out of The 10th Circle of Dante’s Inferno, that he, Vance, was not in favor of a nation-wide abortion ban. Right, like I’m not in favor of public libraries.
As a columnist in The Guardian: noted, “It was taken as given …that the United States should have a bellicose foreign policy in the Middle East. It was taken as a given that immigrants are hurting the economy and spreading crime. The moderators even framed a question around the notion that building new housing could harm the economy. That these ideas are considered unbiased and non-partisan is an extremely bleak sign for the country’s near future.”
Well, that’s not new.
Oh, and one last note about Yellowbelly Vance. On Sept. 28, so we learn from Talking Points Memo, “JD Vance spoke at a Christian political event hosted by the most influential religious leader you’ve probably never heard of. His name is Lance Wallnau, and he is one of the chief proponents of a radical religious doctrine called the Seven Mountain Mandate. He’s an election denier. He’s said Kamala Harris engaged in “witchcraft” in her debate with Donald Trump and that an “occult spirit” is working “on her and through her.” And he’s a leader of one of the most dangerous political factions in America: the religious movement that helped fuel the insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.”
Well, I will end on a more cheerful note. thanks here to Daily Kos: “As it turns out, there was indeed serious fraud in the 2020 election. On Thursday, one perpetrator of that fraud was sentenced to nine years in prison for her crimes. Tina Peters, the clerk of Mesa County, Colorado, in 2020, tampered with voting machines in an effort to prove the election had been rigged against Trump. The data she allowed to be downloaded made its way to a presentation given by Mike Lindell, the pillow-hawking conspiratist.”
To sum up, right now, we have in our midst one of the worst Right-wing movements in the Modern (post-Eighteenth Century) Era. There is no sugar-coating it. They are genuinely evil. To conclude with a remark by Paul Krugman, Trump “ has constructed a whole dystopian fantasy world, trying to persuade voters that America is a nation with a collapsing economy overrun by violent immigrants.” Our World. Look at North Carolina and incredible fraud about hurricane relief all over the Internet. There’s nothing they won’t do.
