Tradition has it that in 406 B.C., when the great Greek tragedian Sophocles was 90 years old, his son and executor Iophon, in a brazen attempt to get his hands on the estate before his father had died, took him to court on the charge of being senile and therefore incapable of managing the family finances. By way of defending himself, the nonagenarian dramatist simply recited—from memory, without cue cards or teleprompter— several passages from his Oedipus at Colonus, which he had just completed but not yet published. Struck by the magnificence of what they had heard, the judges peremptorily dismissed the suit against him and chastised his avaricious accuser.
That’s how the Great Presidential Debate was supposed to go for the senescent but intellectually masterful President against the doltish usurper who maliciously accused him of being mentally incapable of managing the affairs of state. In the days and weeks leading up to it, everyone in the Biden machine, as well as their mouthpieces in the mainstream media (a.k.a the Democrat Party Ministry of Propaganda), recited the same litany of superlatives to assure us of their leader’s Einsteinian mental acumen: he’s sharp as a tack, on top of his game, a mine of information, has an iron grasp on the facts, is fit as a fiddle, in complete control, in better form than he has ever been (though they forgot to mention his 6 handicap). The ubiquitous repetition of the precise wordings of these encomia reminded us yet again of what the herd of independent minds can come up with when they are inspired to rhetorical ecstasies by the leftist media’s divine patroness, the Muse of the Redundant Cliché.
The late Joe Sobran’s famous analogy of liberal mass-mindedness (and the endlessly repeated slogans in which they betray their ideological conformism) was to “the hive,” in which the individual worker bees knew instinctively what to do to please their Queen—as the Dems are now dedicated to the newly crowned Kamala—and ensure the thrift of the collective. Notwithstanding my respect for Joe, watching any montage of the pundits on CNN, MSNBC, ABC, et. al. intoning, day after day, exactly the same thing, in exactly the same words, often at exactly the same time across the progressive media spectrum has undermined my belief in his theory. I am now convinced that they use some sort of high-tech instantaneous messaging system: something the Secret Service might consider investing in, since they seem not be have been able to relay the information they had received from rally attendees on several occasions long before the would-be assassin got off his eight shots at the former President. But then, as we are supposed to believe, the Secret Service doesn’t even have the medieval siege equipment necessary to scale a roof whose “slope” is so gentle that Biden himself could have climbed it with greater ease than the “child” boarding stairs he regularly stumbles over on his ascent into Air Force One.
It would be cruel to recount the innumerable gaffes that Biden committed during the past several weeks alone, except to note that pathological liars often unconsciously betray the truth they are trying to hide. Indeed, if you believe in the wisdom of the unconscious, some of Biden’s mental lapses will come to seem prophetic, as when, at the NATO Summit, he introduced “the President of Ukraine, who has as much courage as determination…. Ladies and gentlemen, President Putin.” In fact, Biden and the NATO leaders seem to be the only people left in the world who have not yet recognized that Putin will soon be the President of Ukraine, absent the West’s suicidal determination to stop him even at the risk of self-pauperization and nuclear war; and that in resisting the West’s woke imperialism Putin has demonstrated more courage and determination than any Western leader with the exception of Victor Orban.
During the debate, in attempting to answer a question about the deficit, and inevitably falling into another syntactical black hole—have you noticed that Biden’s working-class opener “here’s the deal” typically trails off into the coda ”well, anyway,” which is the President’s invariable way of putting his meandering and abortive sentences out of their misery?–, Biden proclaimed proudly that he had “beaten Medicare” (reminding us of the inevitable consequences of his administration’s unprecedented deficit spending on such demented projects as the “green new deal,” forgiving student loans, sex-reassignment surgery for Americans of every class, creed, and color, and housing illegal aliens in luxury hotels, to name a few). This set up one of Trump’s best lines (“Well, he’s right: he did beat Medicaid. He beat it to death”) and opened the door for the former President to point out that Biden’s enlistment of millions of illegal aliens onto the rolls of Medicare and Social Security has fiscally doomed both programs.
Similarly, Biden’s boast that he got America out of Afghanistan served only to remind us of the thirteen Americans killed during that botched operation, not to mention its re-potentiation of the Taliban. (The dishonesty of that boast was made explicit immediately thereafter when the President claimed that no American life was lost on his watch.)
To paraphrase Homer in his famous introduction to the Catalogue of the Ships, one would need “ten tongues and ten mouths” to list all the blatant and anciently debunked lies Biden told during the debate: that inflation was at 9 percent when he took office; that he created “15,000 new jobs,” including “800,000 new manufacturing jobs” (?; good luck with the math, though in any case, as Trump correctly pointed out, these were all “bounce-back” jobs after COVID); that the Border Patrol endorsed him; that we now have “40 percent fewer” illegal crossings—which is little like crowing that Chicago’s annual record-breaking murder rate was down by 40 percent this weekend)—and that border security is “better than when [Trump] left office”; that Trump called World War II veterans “losers and suckers,” praised the “Neo-Nazis” at Charlottesville, and claimed that “Hitler’s done some good things”; that he incited the January 6 “insurrection” (contra Trump’s speech to his supporters exhorting them to remain peaceful and follow the rule of law, and his offer to provide 10,000 National Guardsmen, rejected by Pelosi); that if elected, Trump promised a retributive “bloodbath” (a term he used in the context of the decimation of the auto industry by Biden’s EV mandates); that Trump wants to “cut the cops”; that “the only existential threat to humanity is climate change,” and the United States is the “number one” polluter in the world; that Trump had the “largest deficit of any president in history” (excluding the current president, as he neglected to mention).
When the question of abortion was so accommodatingly posed by the CNN debate moderators, Biden alleged that “the vast majority of constitutional scholars supported Roe when it was decided.” (Biden, as we have all come to observe, reflexively invokes panels of “independent experts” to back up his lies, as, for example, the 51 former CIA directors who dismissed the Hunter laptop as a Russian plant). But the original justices did not, in fact, find a right to abortion in the Constitution and declared it a matter for the legislative branch to decide.
The convolutions of his statement on abortion were classic Biden, veering off as it did into a threnody on what is supposedly an epidemic of incest and marital rape in America, while mentioning along the way the rape of a young woman by an illegal alien (oops!), and concluding that late-term abortions never occur except to save the life of the mother. To his credit, Trump reminded us of the infanticidal musings of the former governor of Virginia about what to do with a baby who had been born alive and healthy after a botched attempt to kill it just moments before it would have crossed the metaphysical line that separates a “mass of protoplasm,” a “part of the woman’s body,” from an autonomous human person.
The post-debate excuses were as mendacious as the pre-debate assurances of Biden’s competency. He had a cold; his lack of make-up made him look pale under the lights; he was suffering from jet lag (despite being back from Europe and resting at Camp David for almost two weeks prior to the debate, suggesting that there is kind of jet lag that is the equivalent of long-Covid); Trump lied 28 times—”you can’t debate with a liar”—, though Biden couldn’t remember whether he watched the debate, so is unlikely to have been able to have kept a running tally in his mind during it, leaving aside the question of whether, in his current state, Biden can even count up to that number.
Each successive excuse, as usual, was counted upon to supply the deficiencies of the last, and, as they mounted up, they put one in mind of that famous scene (to which I have alluded elsewhere in these pages) in the movie The Blues Brothers, in which the John Belushi character is cornered by a machine-gun toting Carrie Fisher about to eliminate him for having left her at the altar: “I ran out of gas. I had a flat tire. I didn’t have enough money for cab fare. My tux didn’t come back from the cleaners. An old friend came in from out of town. Someone stole my car. There was an earthquake, a terrible flood, locusts! It wasn’t my fault! I swear to God!”
It wasn’t as though the Biden campaign hadn’t been aware of his cognitive deficiencies from the beginning—having spent four years colluding in lying about and covering them up (Kamala being the Obfuscator in Chief)—and then suddenly woke up the morning after the debate to discover that the beau monde had mistaken the inanities of a village idiot for deep thinking—the Chauncey Gardner of Being There theory of what happened. (Come to think of it, the recondite vapidities that regularly tumble from the lips of Kamala—“what might be, unburdened by what has been”; “so when you think about it, there is great significance to the passage of time” (repeated 4 times in under a minute)—demonstrate that the philosophical simpleton is a universal type in politics.)
The only thing the debate changed was that the oligarchic donor class in Silicon Valley, Hollywood, Corporate America, and Wall Street realized that with Biden they couldn’t win. (Had his post-debate polls been as bad as Joe’s, the Party would have dumped Demosthenes.) When they defenestrated him, it was out of no anxiety for the good of the country, as they piously maintained, but a raw calculation of the only means left to them for holding onto power. And in effecting their palace coup and coronation of Kamala, they weren’t the least inhibited in knowing that they had just disenfranchised the millions of ordinary citizens who had voted for Biden in the primary process and replaced the duly elected candidate with another who had never won a primary or caucus vote in her life. Thus, once again, the Democrats stand on the battlements protecting democracy against the “existential threat” to it represented by the “dictatorial” Donald.
Meanwhile, the Democrats have replaced senility with infantilism, while their commitment to mendacity remains unchanged: an overlap that could be nicely illustrated by one of the Venn diagrams Kamala is so entranced by.