The fury did not bubble up inside when I saw the subject – it exploded with the heat of a thousand suns.
The viciousness, the temerity, the uncaring sense of assumed entitlement, the just plain nastiness.
As a reporter and city official and now analytical polemicist, I have received and still get very hurtful emails, emails that contain things that if they were said in public they would be considered slander, or libel if the email was an all-send.
I will not even type the subject line, let alone include the link here – it’s just too nauseating.
It was an email from T Mobile telling me about their senior discount.
Bastards.
Rotten bastards.
There – I’ve got that off my chest.
Last week, CNN finalized its rules for the debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden this coming Thursday. Since, like most people, you haven’t watched the channel in a forever, if you can remember what the channel number is, it starts at 9 p.m. eastern.
No audience, microphone kill switches, and, of course, it being on CNN would seem to tilt the whole affair in Biden’s direction. But his campaign – please, of course it wasn’t him – made an odd decision. Like a coin toss at the beginning of a football game, Team Biden had a decision to make after they won it: pick which side of the stage you want your podium on or get to give the last statement, in other words, to get the last word.
They picked the podium location.
This was such an odd move that the actual conspiracy theorists on the internet have decided that the only explanation for it is that the android Biden’s been replaced with has to be on a particular side of the stage of the lights will make it eyes melt or something.
Giving Donald Trump the last word in any discussion pretty much means you will lose – he’s not the kind of guy to say “well, you know you made some really good pints and I’m going to go home and think about them.”
And as for the android theory, that is absolutely untrue. If you are old enough to remember Ted Koppel on Nightline, he said he was asked surprisingly often whether or not he wore a toupee and he would respond incredulously “if I wore a rug, do you think it would look like this?”
Same with the Biden robot – if he had been replaced by a robot we would not be watching and listening to so many screw-ups. First, it would walk more like a human and second it would talk more like a human. Biden’s public decrepitude would not be an issue and he would be five points ahead of Trump if he were a robot.
So – terrifying enough – that’s the real deal…except for whatever cocktail of uppers and downers and sidewaysers his campaign will have him on. Expect Ol’ Black Eyes to make a return to the stage Thursday.
A month ago I wrote about the possibility that the timing of the debate – never been one earlier – was purposefully set to see if Biden could handle it without stumbling and slurring or talking to dead people or shaking hands with invisible ones. If not, bye-bye Joe – the party has more than enough time to (gracefully?) replace him.
Because it is very very possible that Biden will collapse or wander off stage or ask about the moderators’ dead relatives or slur his words or talk about how he freed Nelson Mandela from jail while he was single handedly desegregating, oh, maybe, say France this time.
In other words, anything that has happened since he took office could possibly happen again and if it’s bad enough it could be a dream come true for the Democrats.
For then the party will have an obvious and incontrovertible and spinnably non-political reason to replace him as the nominee and then they will have two months to figure who gets the top spot on the ticket.
In other words, if Biden goes Biden in public in June he becomes eminently replaceable in August.
Like a terrible casting choice in a Broadway play, Biden can be dumped between the Boston preview run and the New York premiere.
If Biden does manage to make it through the debate, though, the Democrats will, short of a sudden physical ailment, be Gorilla Glue stuck with him as he and whatever personally loyal supporters and his wife will dig in their heels and say “see – he’s fine and the public has seen it so stop talking about getting rid of him.”
Those are both very possible, very likely scenarios so the key to Thursday’s debate will not be what is said but far more how it is said. And Trump – this time – needs to remember that, needs to remember to let Biden keep talking.
This week’s epigram is yet again not an epigram but a line from a public service announcement from a cable company:
“Happy Pride Month from Cox!”
Since I’m really 13-years-old and absolutely not fifty-blah-blah I just found it very funny.
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