SATURDAY: The situation had been visible!

SATURDAY, JUNE 29, 2024

Will Cain gets it (somewhat) right: In you watched Thursday night's event, you saw the two worst debate performances in presidential history.

A consensus seems to have formed concerning President Biden's side of the ledger. By general agreement, his worst moment came at 9:12 p.m., when he played the central role in this three-way debacle:

TAPPER (6/29/24):  President Trump, we will get to immigration later in this block. President Biden, I want to give you an opportunity to respond to this question about the national debt.

BIDEN:  He had the largest national debt of any president four-year period, number one.

Number two, he got $2 trillion tax cut, benefited the very wealthy. What I’m going to do is fix the tax system.  For example:

We have a thousand trillionaires in America–I mean, billionaires in America. 

And what’s happening, they’re in a situation where they, in fact, pay 8.2 percent in taxes. If they just paid 24 percent, 25 percent—either one of those numbers—they’d raise 500 million dollars–billion dollars, I should say—in a ten-year period.

We’d be able to right–wipe out his debt. We’d be able to help make sure that all those things we need to do—child care, elder care, making sure that we continue to strengthen our healthcare system—making sure that we’re able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I’ve been able to do with the, uh, the Covid—excuse me, with dealing with everything we have to do with, uh—

[PAUSE]

Look—

[PAUSE]

If—

[PAUSE]

We finally beat Medicare.

TAPPER:  Thank you, President Biden. President Trump?

"We finally beat Medicare?"

At the end of a halting presentation full of self-corrections, that's what the president said. In this awkward, tragic moment, we TV viewers were transported to the moors, where King Lear was wandering.

In a striking non-response, the moderator moved right along, failing to ask President Biden what he could have meant by that astonishing statement. As the debacle continued, Candidate Trump responded to the moderator's prompt with a welter of crazy claims.

Along the way, President Biden had made a peculiar set of statements:

In what way could $50 billion per year in additional revenue "wipe out President Trump's debt," even while allowing us to address a wide range of social concerns? In what universe could that happen?

Also, if President Biden is "going to fix the tax system," why hasn't he attempted to do so in the past three-plus years? 

Meanwhile, does President Biden, as a candidate, have some major tax proposal? If he does, have you ever heard anyone, including President Biden himself, say what that proposal is?

On Thursday night, Candidate Trump responded to the moderator's prompt with a welter of crazy claims. But Candidate Biden's fumbling claim—his claim that he somehow "finally beat Medicare"—took all of us out to the moors.

The debate was barely ten minutes old when the president made this presentation. The moderator plowed ahead as if nothing had happened—as if nothing needed to be clarified, questioned, explained. 

What were we the people seeing as we watched that three-way exchange? We were seeing the shape of  American discourse, to the extent that we're able to produce some such creature at this point in time. 

Barely ten minutes into the event, viewers were observing an imitation of discourse—an imitation engaged in by all three participants, Biden and Tapper and Trump.

This is the best we the people can do at this point in time! In fact, our discourse has been functioning at this level for at least the past forty years, though its failures have rarely been as easy to spot as they were this past Thursday night.

That presentation represents who and what we actually are. This morning, we saw a somewhat accurate overview of this state of affairs—a somewhat accurate partial overview—offered in a surprising venue:

We saw it offered at the very start of the Fox & Friends Weekend program!

This partial overview came from Will Cain, the most measured of this gruesome program's three weekend co-hosts. 

Cain sometimes inserts a dollop of nuance into this program's imitations of discourse. This morning, at 6:06 a.m., we saw him (somewhat correctly) make this statement about President Biden's performance:

CAIN (6/29/24): You know, this is the first time I've had an opportunity to reflect publicly on this debate—and there's just so much to say. 

You know, first of all, it wasn't a bad performance. It was par for the course. They can't get away now with telling us, "I had a bad night, and you get up and knock the dust off when you get knocked down." 

This was confirmation of something that we've known for a long time—not weeks, not months, but that we've known for years.

[...]

Most importantly, what I want to point out right now is the lies, the absolute gaslighting that needs, I think, to be at the top of the line. 

Because not only has Joe Biden compromised America. But everyone surrounding him—Karine Jean-Pierre, his cabinet, his chief of staff—and most importantly, the fourth estate, the media that has told us this is the best version of Joe, that he is great, that it's Trump that [UNINTELLIGIBLE]—they have lied to us, to the compromise of the United States.

We wouldn't agree with every word. For starters, we almost never traffic in L-bombs.

Also, we've edited out part of the statement. We do agree with these parts of what Cain said concerning President Biden's performance:

First, what became apparent on Thursday night has been apparent for some time—in our view for many months, though probably not "for years." 

Also, large elements of Blue America's media have been gaslighting the public about what was otherwise apparent to the eye.  We especially think of the Morning Joe program where we've been told, again and again, that President Biden is sharp as a tack—that Red America's claims to the contrary were in fact a welter of lies.

For the record, no one who co-hosts a program as gruesome as Fox & Fruends Weekend should get to complain, in this way, about the gaslighting performed by anyone else.

That said, Cain's aim was true with respect to those basic points. We the people of Blue America have been played, again and again, by the corporate hirelings we're told we can trust on our own nation's "cable news" programs.

Here at this site, we were surprised when the Biden campaign arranged this debate because of what we'd seen on Fox News Channel programs. The millionaire stars on MSNBC had been keeping that video hidden away, even as Joe Scarborough kept telling us, day after day, that the president is sharp as a tack.

No one who co-hosts a show like Fox & Friends Weekend should be allowed to cast himself in the straight shooter role. But we had assumed, at least since last summer, that President Bidne wouldn't be able to participate in a debate.

On Thursday night, at 9:12 p.m., the reality hit the fan.

As currently programmed, the Fox News Channel is a coarse and vulgar pseudo-journalistic disgrace. That said, the dissembling has been general over Blue America's media—and voters who vote the way we do need to understand this fact.

There will be much more to say about these matters next week. But President Biden's unfortunate state has been visible for some time—and news orgs which serve our own Blue America were refusing to deal with that fact.

On Thursday evening, President Biden said that he'd finally beaten Medicare. Jake Tapper, a good, decent person, proceeded ahead just as if nothing whatever had happened.

It happened on Thursday, at 9:12 p.m. This is the current state of the race.

Sadly, there's a great deal of truth to what Will Cain said. This is the state of the human race, as the gods on Olympus all laugh!