I think it might finally be getting to me. But you can't look away from this kind of horror. Tell you what: I'm just gonna rant for a minute. I'm just tired of trying to make sense.
The moderator asked some halfway decent questions about the pandemic, and at least genuflected at global warming in passing. The president brought nothing surprising, or even mildly interesting. It was like his heart isn't even in it. His attempts at verbal hand-grenades were weak. His gesticulations, which are loosely related to whatever baloney is coming from the front of his head, seemed to have a life of their own, even when he wasn't making any noise. That was almost hypnotic, now that I think of it. Gosh: maybe that's his secret power.
He did blame the death rate, on "Joe" of course. The man and the party not in power were somehow responsible for 200 thousand dead Americans.
But after such lowballs drifted over the plate, with two minutes in front of the only live mic in the room - although the involuntarily silenced president was interrupting visually with his bizarre hand gestures - Biden somehow forgot to mention even the germ theory.
Nobody (shame on the moderator) brought up the outright sabotage and theft that deprived frontline workers of the most basic hygienic protections while pitching bodies into stalled refrigerator trucks and digging trench-graves on Hart Island. Not a peep about the careful dismantling of programs and systems already in place, that had in fact provided early warnings, undertaken when the plague was still in test tubes having its DNA sequenced. No whisper of bought-and-paid-for medical shipments being hijacked and resold by FEMA under the direction of one of the princes of the First Family. No discussion of presidential obstruction and interference in well-established public health administration or the hard science behind it.
Maybe that bald contempt for public intelligence has gone viral too.
We'll show 'em. Pandemic, eh? See how much pandemic they find when their little lab is boarded up. And there's too many tests. The more tests, the more cases, there are too many tests. Get rid of the tests. It will go away.
Of course the president ignored all the questions and instead repeated over and over his schoolyard bully denials and threats. I-know-I-am-but-what're-you?
The strategy of boring the general public to death has been tried many times. It doesn't seem to move the needle much. We all expect this. The man has no sense of dignity. Denial of the glaringly obvious is all he's got. Confidence. That's what "con" is short for.
But his opponent, the man we're all going to have to vote for if we hope to avoid the replacement of the violent criminal gang that dick Cheney, no, Henry Kissinger, no, the Dulles brothers put in place in my childhood... where was I? Oh yes, the replacement of our, um, government with, um, a criminal gang... Well, you see what we're facing now. Western Asia, meet the new boss. Same as the old boss. America, go back to sleep. We got this.
And then, the challenger on whom we're pinning our short-term hopes got tired.
Slurred speech and sentence structure that drifted alarmingly in the turns. A descent into feeble attempts to catch some of the muck and toss it back in the vague direction of the smoldering dung-heap that spewed it.
(What I'm going to say here is irresponsible and naive. But I'm almost done.)
All this is probably widely understood by now to mean that the real challenger in this election is the Vice Presidential Candidate, Senator Harris. And before we dismiss that idea, it might be worth remembering some recent history. Namely that dick Cheney.
W's VP, as everybody knew full well, was the real head of state. It was that d - it was he, who ran the country into the ground, and into the perpetual wars we're still mired in, that bloated the munitions corporations to the point where ending the wars would cause a second Great Depression. Now they supply the belligerents in the latest proxy-wars, like Nagorno-Karabakh.
The present admin didn't quite keep to this rather successful playbook. They got a VP nobody can stand for more than five minutes, which is one way to protect the big guy. That was what the likes of Dan Quayle was all about (could he really not spell "potato?") Dumber than a box of rocks is not what you need. And they didn't pay enough attention to the Svengali aspect either. Those creepy nazis would scare away the rest of the A-list almost anywhere in Georgetown. Washington socialites still have a little class. Don't they? But maybe that's what they meant by "the swamp."
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