a debate without fact-checking is worse than no debate at all

but don’t despair, there’s good news out there

what the fuck was that?

on paper, it sounded great. two-minute answers, and then mics muted. Donny won’t be able to filibuster. he’ll be constrained. it’ll be a nice, orderly debate.

in real life, it ended up being a hundred-megaton nuclear meltdown.

ever hear of the Gish Gallop?

The Gish gallop is a rhetorical technique in which a person in a debate attempts to overwhelm their opponent by providing an excessive number of arguments with no regard for the accuracy or strength of those arguments.

Donny Convict gish galloped the fuck out of that quote-unquote “debate.”

he lied, and then poured another lie on top of the lie, and then poured half-dozen half-truths and straw-men arguments on top of those lies. it was overwhelming.

inflation, covid, jobs, foreign policy, January 6th, climate change — every one of Donny’s “answers” followed the same format:

mine was the greatest. it was the greatest ever. it was great. everyone said how great it was. the greatest. then he came in and now it’s a disaster. everyone says it’s a disaster. when I get back in it’s gonna be great again.

Donny even jammed abortion into that template, claiming that “everybody” wanted to end Roe v Wade. and once again, he told the hideous lie about “post-birth abortion” — a fever-swamp fantasy that definitely isn’t happening anywhere.

when asked about tariffs, Donny did his usual China will pay for them bullshit, and no one called him on it. no pushback from the moderators — not even a “that’s not how tariffs work.”

in fact, the so-called moderators didn’t moderate a goddamned thing. Jake Tapper and Dana Bash weren’t moderators at all — they were question-askers. your average primary school teacher could have done a better job.

debates require moderation. there has to be a third party to guide the discourse. there has to be a voice of authority to say “that’s just not true. nobody is aborting babies after they’re born.”

given free rein to lie without consequence, Donny just steamrolled his way through the entire 90 minute “debate.”

we all should have seen it coming from a mile away. Joe Biden should have seen it coming from a mile away. maybe he did. maybe that head cold his team told us afterwards that he had — the thing that made his voice all raspy — maybe that kept Biden from being at the top of his game.

how great would it have been if Biden had right up top, said “excuse my voice, folks, I caught a bad cold while in Europe last week” — at least then we’d all have known what was going on — instead of thinking holy shit, what the fuck is wrong with Joe Biden? why does he sound like that?

I have a question: what is a “black job”?

“as sure as you’re sitting there, the fact is that his big kill on the black people is the millions of people that he’s allowed to come in through the border. they’re taking black jobs now.”

“black jobs.” nice. you know what this racist old fuck means by “black jobs.” he means unskilled, low-paying jobs — the kind that only those people are fit to have.

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an hour and half after the end of the debate — long after everyone had changed the channel or fallen asleep — CNN finally aired a three-minute-long fact check of Donny’s lies.

gee, thanks, CNN. awesome job.

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the happiest person on the planet right now is Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, the nepo-publisher of The New York Times, because now he gets to continue his jihad against Joe Biden.

the entire media is have a feeding frenzy right now, because the worthless scribblers of the press love nothing more than A Narrative.

piling on Joe Biden for having one off night is so much more fun than writing about how Donny Convict and his Project 2025 henchmen are actively working to end democracy.

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steady on, folks. the hand-wringers and the bed-wetters are going to wring their hands and wet their beds, because that’s what they do.

in a world of AG Sulzbergers, be a Gavin Newsom.

MSNBC: “you were out there getting a chorus of questions about whether Biden should step down. there is panic that has set in among people who have watched this debate who are Democrats, people who are strategists, and some even inside Democratic campaigns. do you think it’s unfounded?”

Gavin Newsom: “well, I think it’s unhelpful, and I think it’s unnecessary. we’ve got to go in, we’ve got to keep our heads high — and as I say, we’ve got to have the back of this president. you don’t turn your back because of one performance. what kind of party does that? it’s been a master class. 50.6 million jobs. that eight times more than the last three Republican presidents combined. the only thing the last three Republican presidents have in common is recessions. Democrats delivered. this president has delivered. we need to deliver for him, at this moment. with all due respect, the more time we start having these conversations go down these rabbit holes, it’s unhelpful to our democracy, the fate and future of this country, and the world. they need us right now to step up, and that’s exactly what I intend to do.”

fuck yeah, Gavin.

look, folks, there’s good news out there.

David Plouffe says Trump’s debate performance did poorly with swing voters in focus groups, “No one was saying ‘I am really excited about Donald Trump coming back to the presidency.’ He reconfirmed all the reasons they voted against him in 2020.”

Donny bombed with a post-debate Univision focus group.

Matt Barretto: If you haven’t been watching the Univision FG of undecided Latino voters, nearly every single undecided voter said they now support Biden, not Trump! Latinos were watching and listening and Trump sounded like a crazy liar.

this Michigan undecided voter sounds like she’s pretty much made a decision.

“when it comes to a strong leader and what we’re looking for in a strong leader, I’m looking for somebody that I trust to be able to uphold policies that will protect me, and are more concerned with the general well-being of everybody in the United States, which I got more from Biden, considering he talked a lot more about policies, what he’s done and what he intends to do. whereas on the other side, from Trump all I’ve really heard was ‘I’ve done this, the best ever,’ but I never heard what it was.”

it’s early yet.

Donny Fuckface is going to keep holding hate-rallies and blithering incoherently like a lunatic about what would happen if Hannibal Lecter got electrocuted by a shark and repulsing anyone who isn’t already a MAGA cultist, and Joe Biden is going to keep soberly running this country.

it ain’t over til it’s over.