To paraphrase an old Richard Pryor joke, “Who are you going to believe? Me, or your own lying eyes?”
Since the presidential debate last week, the leaders of the Democratic Party, in full 5-alarm fire mode, want us to believe we didn’t see what we saw.
“It was just a cold.”
“Everybody has an off night.”
“Ok, so it wasn’t his best performance.”
“All presidents have one bad debate.”
“You’re not going to judge 52 years of public service by 90 minutes of a lousy debate, are you?”
“He’s 81! What do you expect? You’ll be 81 someday!”
“He’s not a quitter. He’s all in. This is Scranton Joe we’re talkin’ about!”
“Yeah. Sure. The debate was a disaster. So what?”
These answers are all malarkey. That’s probably because we are asking the wrong question when we ask “What are we going to do about Joe?”
Maybe we should be asking what are we going to do about ourselves — and what can we do to get him some help?
Perhaps we should start with a definition of terms. Why do people keep calling it a “debate?” Isn’t that kind of like saying Israel is at “war” with Hamas? After all, if it’s a “war,” don’t there have to be things like armies, tanks, fighter jets, aircraft carriers, and the threat of nuclear annihilation on both sides? If only one side has these things, and the other side has none of them, is it really a war?
Was it really a debate if one of the debaters is so mentally and physically incapacitated that he cannot complete a sentence, randomly flips between discussing abortion, the three trimesters of a pregnancy and how great his golf game is, then looking around, unable to find one of the four cameras pointing at him, he suddenly turns his head all the way to the left as if he were looking for Rhode Island, and then out of nowhere raises his voice and shouts, “WE FINALLY BEAT MEDICARE!” Not Ohio State, but Medicare.
We saw and we heard all of that, no matter what the Party hacks keep telling us. It was heartbreaking. It was truly, without equivocation, unlike anything any of us had ever seen. No matter where you stood on the Joe Biden scale, from Joe the Working Class Hero to Joe the Banker of Palestinian Ethnic Cleansing, one thing was certain: This was not a cold. This was a human being in utter collapse. Not just political collapse, or performance collapse, but rather a full frontal lobe meltdown where at any moment you had to wonder… was it possible that the sweet and fragile existence we call “life” was about to short-circuit, or worse, lose power (to Trump)? And that no amount of shouting “STAT!” or cutting quickly to a commercial break was going to restore the President-cum-Patient to full capacity in order to save this even more fragile Democracy.
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