NOT THE IDES OF MARCH: WHY DEMOCRATS NEED TO STOP PISSING ALL OVER THEMSELVES OVER JOE BIDEN'S PERFORMANCE LAST NIGHT.

 

Summary: Thursday night's performance in the presidential debate was not wonderful for President Joe Biden, and perhaps even worse for Donald Trump. Trump, of course, cannot tell the truth; his entire debate performance  consisted of a "Gish gallop," deflecting questions and reverting again and again to lies and close-to-defamatory attacks on President. Biden. President Biden, for his part, was suffering from a fairly severe cold and did not answer the questions nearly as well as he should have. From the point of view of a practicing lawyer, one can only observe that neither party turned in anything close to a satisfactory, let alone a winning, performance.
     Yet, the Democrats, as we tend to do far too often, have gone into a fetal crouch mode, with some sections of the Democratic and Democratic-leaning commentariat calling for Biden to withdraw as a candidate. This kind of cowardice should be unacceptable in a politics in which we know that Trump and his other bullies will seek any advantage they can, and in which, therefore, Democrats need to go low with Republicans, being willing to meet them in the basement with an AK-47 and a switchblade. It is quite simply time for Democrats to stop whingeing and pissing themselves, and stand up and say despite the lackluster performance of the president, he is still our guy and we are still going to rally behind him. Any Democrat or any Democrat-leaner who takes the cowardly position that President Biden is somehow disqualified on the basis of his performance in a single debate ought to be expelled from the Party.

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By: Paul S. Marchand

 Here is my Royal boot in your Royal buttocks.

– Line spoken by King Henry II in Lion in Winter

Buck up, man, and stop pissing yourself.

-Variously attributed, among others, to Winston Churchill, the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo, and the Duke of Marlborough at the battle of Blenheim.

I am your retribution.

-Donald Trump

Et Tu, Bruté.

-Last words of Gaius Julius Caesar as he lay dying in the Senate House, Rome, March 15, 44 BC 

Cathedral City, June 28, 2024 --- Last Thursday night's performances in the presidential debate were not the kind of things that any high school debater ought to be proud of. Donald Trump's performance consisted of deflecting questions and offering outright lies and close-to-defamatory statements about the president. President Biden, who was apparently suffering from a severe cold, allowed his malady to get the better of his debate performance.

Yet, on substance, Pres. Biden clearly had the better performance the other evening. He commented intelligently on the policy questions put before him and delivered terse and cogent rebuttals to some of the attacks leveled by Donald Trump, who simply reinforced his reputation for telling any lie he thinks he can get away with in the context of a debate. That Trump was not suffering from a cold (and Biden's cold may very well have been the result of a little bit of Russian dirty tricks) made him appear more in command of himself than usual. Trump was also aided by the persons moderating, CNN's Dana Bash and Jake Tapper, who did not seem to want to bother doing any fact checking, but instead satisfied themselves with repeating questions to which they did not think they had gotten answers, except of course in the case of Trump where they allowed him simply to lie his way through just about every answer he provided.  CNN's staff clearly need a royal boot in the royal buttocks.

In short, CNN's moderators gave an appearance of being Republican partisans, which to all accounts is not correct, but it certainly gives viewers the suspicion that CNN may have instructed them to go easy on Trump on the assumption that Trump might possibly win in November. Clearly, CNN, like Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook, does not want to be seen as being on the wrong side of Donald Trump.

But, CNN apparently has no such fear when it comes to President Biden. Now some of this apparent posturing from CNN may be the result of a fear of Donald Trump winning the presidency, and some of it may just be out-and-out Republican partisanship on the part of the news management team at CNN. Either way, CNN can be faulted for their failure to fact check Donald Trump, for their failure to call him out on his lies, and their failure to keep Trump on track and responsive to the questions. CNN should not be invited to host any more presidential debates, not this year, not in 2028, not in 2032, not in 2036, not in 2040, and so on. Their piss poor performance in last night's debate ought to be permanently disqualifying.  Their gathering together of a group of hand-wringing pundits on Saturday to continue pillorying the president should also disqualify CNN from ever again hosting a presidential debate. If the DNC had any courage at all, they would send CNN's leadership a nasty letter to that effect.

But more than that, is the craven and cowardly performance of the Democratic commentariat and Democratic-leaning news sources such as the New York Times, which still apparently believes itself to be the paper of record, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a whole slew of left-leaning digital news outlets as well. In their editorial pages yesterday the New York Times called for Biden's to withdraw  from the presidential race. The New York Times's sickening position was echoed by opinion writers from The Daily Beast, Politico, as well as by numerous ostensibly Democratic commentators lining up, as the Senators did to assassinate Caesar on the Ides of March, 44 BC.

What has been on display in the last 120 hours has been one of the most sickening, stomach turning, offensive turnings on the leader of a Party ever seen in the history of this country. Not since Benjamin Franklin Bache, in the Philadelphia Aurora at the turn of the 19th century, attacked Presidents Washington and Adams, have we seen such an appalling want, not merely of loyalty, but of common sense from various editorial writers and prominent Democrats.The language used by some of the chattering classes and by certain Democrats is almost Trumpian in its disloyal tone.

We all know that the president is facing a fairly serious challenge from a right wing traitor who enjoys support from Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-un, Orbán Viktor, Nigel Farage, Javier Milei, Binyamin Netanyahu, and a whole slew of other dictatorial autocrats and wannabes throughout the world. What makes the New York Times, The Daily Beast, Politico, and the various ostensibly Democratic members of the chattering classes so worthy of condemnation is their apparent adherence not only to a Trumpian belief in Mr. Biden's weakness, but also to a particularly malodorous ageist trope that somehow, because the man is fourscore and one years old, he just doesn't "have it," that he can't be trusted to do the job and to do it well.

As a man of threescore years, staring my future in the face, and not particularly liking what I see, I find such thinking shortsighted, foolish, and indeed, delusional. If we consider what has been done on Joe Biden's watch in the last three-and--half years, and we compare it to what has been (laugh out loud) accomplished during the Trump years, the case for reelecting Joe Biden becomes crystal clear. Indeed, the case for reelecting Joe Biden in a choice where the other candidate is Donald Trump, rises to the level of a Kantian moral imperative. As a number of British statesmen might have put it, stand up, men, and stop pissing yourselves.  

Even were the president to withdraw from this election, who would have the chops to step in and take over when this president has accomplished as much as he has? Who among Democrats, that is among authentic Democrats, would be willing to sacrifice their personal honor and loyalty to the nation, to the Party, to their constituents, and yes, to Joe Biden himself. We all know that in the American political system, one becomes well-known, and potentially electable, by being associated with a previous president of his own Party. What we've learned in the last eight years is that outsiders cannot be trusted to administer the government, experience is absolutely a necessary prerequisite for public office..

Donald Trump was an outsider; prior to seeking the White House, Donald Trump had never bothered to involve himself in politics in a serious way. Now certainly he had contemplated running for president on the Reform Party ticket back in 2000. But, as we all know, Trump's candidacy as a Reform Party candidate went glimmering. Indeed, we didn't hear much of Donald Trump until he was foolish enough to attend the White House Correspondents' Dinner in 2012 where he became the subject of some rather amusing joking by Pres. Barack Obama, which apparently offended the "delicate" sensibilities of Donald Trump to the point where he decided to run for President when Obama was termed out. A look at Donald Trump at the Correspondents' Dinner showed how angry he was at having been the subject of Obama's deft humor. It certainly proves that Trump was even then planning a retributive campaign and a retributive administration.  

Remember, it was Donald Trump who proclaimed that "I am your retribution."

What we see from Donald Trump during these last seven years is the kind of petulance, the kind of anger, the kind of grievance, and the desire for retribution that Trump has so abundantly displayed. What is clear, from Trump's rallies, from Trump's performance in last night's debate, and in the admissions of his attorneys in the numerous legal cases in which Donald Trump is a defendant, is that Donald Trump refuses to be accountable, he refuses to engage in any kind of introspection, he is utterly un-self-aware, and he simply is not qualified for the presidency.

Instead of concentrating on Trump's failures, as well as on the issues that the Supreme Court has granted us on a plate, issues such as abortion, Christian nationalism, fascism, and the power of the federal government to do good things, we Democrats still find ourselves rolling over into a crouched position and pissing ourselves when it Trump makes a noise. We Democrats are too nice, too willing to concede to the other side might have a point, when actually they don't, and far too willing to shit on our own candidates in a state of total failure and panic. 

Let us shame the devil and tell the truth; last night's performance was dreadful. Neither one of the candidates turned in anything like the performance Americans had a right to expect. But Joe Biden, suffering from a cold and always burdened by a stutter, and burdened with moderators and a network who clearly wanted to do him some harm, gave substantive answers while his opponent lied his way through the entire debate. Democrats need to stop going into a crouch and pissing themselves. After all, this is the Titular Head Of The Party, and we should not do to him what the members the Roman Senate did to Gaius Julius Caesar on the Ides of March, 44 BC.  

Et tu, Bruté? Et vos, Brutii?