Highlights and Results From That Debacle of a Debate

Donald Trump was, once again, childish, immature, rude and, as ever, bullying last evening in what was the first and possibly last "presidential" debate with Joe Biden. I use the word presidential here very, very loosely as this President was anything but presidential. Herewith, some results and takeaways from it all.

Unfortunately for most of us, it either scared or insulted so many of us.

Presidential debate didn't help Trump catch Biden, but horror show scared America

Usually always, it's a presidential debate between 2 mature adults and both have manners. In this case, one, Trump, is neither, of course--not a mature adult and certainly without manners. Or decency.

How do you keep up with a 74 year old man child that incessantly interrupts?

Who would have thought this is where we would be with an American President?

Trump blows up the debate — and himself

Then this was stunning.

Trump was asked to denounce white supremacy. 

He wouldn’t.

A President of the United States was asked, publicly and on camera, to denounce white supremacy and he would not and did not. Stunning.

At least Joe got this in last evening.

Joe Biden Tells Donald Trump 'You're the Worst President America Has Ever Had' During Debate

And he's right, of course. Harding, Buchanan, Nixon, they're all pikers compared to this divisive, ignorant, reckless, dangerous, colluding fool of a President.

Joe also got this in. Thank goodness.

It was fair. It was certainly fair in this one regard, Joe getting that in.

I think it seems extremely clear to most of the voting, adult population of our nation that the time has long since come for the moderator of these debates to have a mute button, capable of cutting off a speaker if they go over their time or are rude and/or interrupting. That much seems clear. That time is now. It's overdue. Long overdue.

Face it, ladies and gentlemen. We need to face the truth, the facts. Donald Trump is dangerous. Surprisingly, frighteningly, legitimately dangerous. No exaggeration or overstatement. Read this next article.

At the debate, Trump made it clear he's already decided the election doesn't count

Then check out some of the results. This is where and what really counts. This is one of the most important results of last night's debacle.

Undecided voters describe Trump as a 'crackhead,' 'arrogant' in post-debate focus group

And this.

BREAKING: CNN instant poll gives it to Biden by 32 points!

The first post-debate polls say Biden won

Oliver Darcy  @oliverdarcy -- CNN instant poll of debate watcher: 60% say Biden won, 28% say Trump won.

As this article above points out, sure, things could still change but this is, of course, a great short term result from last evening. That is a pretty huge margin of win for Joe Biden right there, folks.

One thing seems to be coming clear, too. That is, Donald Trump looks as though he is going to also be the one who gets this Donald Trump presidency defeated.

That 'debate' was bad for America. 

But it was even worse for Trump

Then check out Joe's other great, great result from last night. Another of the most important things that can or could or even should take place in this insanity called a presidential election campaign.

Joe Biden smashed his single-hour fundraising record after the first presidential debate

Ultimately, of course, this, this is what we need.

David Frum: "Trump yelled, threatened, interrupted--and changed nothing. He's Losing."

So there's some hope, folks. Some big things and they went and are going our way, certainly. We can take nothing, nothing for granted, however. 

We must VOTE. 

And we must VOTE BLUE come November 3.

#BLUEWAVE2020

More:

Even America's CEOs are dumping Trump like bad rubbish

Three of This President's Best Critics

3 favorites of mine to read in this Age of Trump:

• David Frum
• George Will
• Bill Kristol

All 3 are deepset, longtime conservatives, Republicans and all 3 rightly savage him. The best critics are from the inside. Herewith, just a few quotes from each, highlighting the horribleness. First up, David Frum.

“President Donald J. Trump did not start the pandemic of course. But at every step of the way, Trump has acted as if guided by one rule: ‘How can I make this trauma worse?’”

Next, George Will, one of Donald Trump's most scathing critics:

"I believe that what this president has done to our culture, to our civic discourse ... you cannot unring these bells and you cannot unsay what he has said, and you cannot change that he has now in a very short time made it seem normal for schoolboy taunts and obvious lies to be spun out in a constant stream. I think this will do more lasting damage than Richard Nixon's surreptitious burglaries did."

So finally, Bill Kristol:

“I'm very honestly just agnostic about what the future looks like,” he says. “I do think in the short term, I think a second term of Donald Trump is very dangerous.”

Important side note---while researching this post, I found the following, too.

George Will: Republicans Will 

Forget Trump 'Fast' After 2020

I'd like to make clear here--we can never let this happen, folks. Once Donald Trump is out of the White House, we can never let the Republicans conveniently "forget" about this man and what he did and tried to do to our nation, our people, our Democracy. Heck, to Democracy itself. It's why I so frequently and repeated write "Thanks, Republicans!" on social media posts. We can never let them forget this man or what they unleashed on this nation and on the world. This will be, must always be a scourge on them and their political party. We, the nation, must never forget---so we never repeat.

Links:

David Frum Rethinks Conservatism

George Will's startling assessment of Donald Trump

Neoconservative Thinker Bill Kristol Says 2nd Term Of Trump Would Be 'Very Dangerous'

George Will calls Trump ‘sad, embarrassing wreck of a man

Conservative Icon George Will Urges November Sweep: Vote Out Trump, All GOP Enablers

Search Results

Web results

Donald Trump Is Crazy, and So Is the GOP for Embracing Him

The New York Times Asks a Great Question Today on Democracy, This Pandemic and Even Our Nation

Yes, today's Sunday New York Times asks, I think, an excellent question.

Can Democracy Survive the Pandemic?

Online, they change it to "Will Americans Lose Their Right to Vote in the Pandemic?"

And sure that's one good and appropriate, timely question but the better question is the one in the print, paper version you see above here. With this pandemic and the need for social distancing, will we lose voting privileges? Especially since the Republicans are in charge of the US Senate and White House currently.

But I have, I think a far better question presently. I think there's a far better and more timely and important question we need to be asking just now.

That is, "Can Democracy Survive this President?"

And then, can Democracy survive the Republicans in, again, the US Senate and White House?

Can America?

Links:

Donald Trump is destroying the United States’ standing 

Can the Constitution Survive Trump?

The Rule of Law Is Being 'Suffocated' by Trump 

This Is Still Happening: William Barr’s corruption

'A threat to democracy'

The Rule of Law is Being 'Suffocated' by Trump and His 'Personal Henchman' Barr, Says Harvard Constitutional 

Will American Democracy Survive The Trump Swamp?

And note, Right Wingers, Conservatives and die-hard Republicans are asking this, too.

David Frum: Will American Democracy Survive Trump?

Is This President Losing It?

The reason I ask the question in the title:

Donald Trump Spent His Saturday Going on a Deranged, Paranoid Rant About the Election

This, ladies and gentlemen, seems clearly to be one more way in which this President has become and is showing himself to be dangerous. Dangerous at least to the nation. At least.

Some from the article:

It’s only mid-April...and President Donald Trump is already accusing Democrats of “trying to steal the election out from under [him].

It seems he sent out a fund raising letter today saying "the Democrats are trying to steal the Election" from him.

Conservative writer David Frum said it so rightly, too, in response:

"Five months from the voting, @realDonaldTrump is explicitly accusing the Democrats of trying to steal the election from him. He will ramp this up so that by Election Day his supporters will not believe any result other than his reelection is legitimate.

The rest of the brief article:

As with many Trump statements, it’s a futile and counterproductive exercise to try to debunk it in full, but he (okay, his campaign’s digital fundraising staffer) is referring to a push, mainly by Democrats, to expand absentee voting access before the fall. In case you haven’t heard, there’s a global pandemic that’s shut down life as we know it in the United States, and turned the act of in-person-voting—or working at a voting precinct—into a life-threatening proposition. Wouldn’t it be nice to vote without dying? And some states, such as California, Oregon, and Washington, already make it possible for anyone to cast their vote by mail—in fact they’ve been doing it a long time with no real issues or fraud. (Incidentally, there was a big case of absentee-ballot fraud in 2018—which ended in a do-over election and the indictment of a Republican campaign worker.)

Trump’s full of bluster, but let’s not lose sight how insane this is. The sitting president is accusing his opponents of “trying to steal” the election simply because they want to make sure people are able to vote safely in a pandemic—and he’s doing it just to raise money....

A frightening man in a potentially frightening time. God, Gods, Heaven and the heavens help us all, from now to November. 

I think there is every indication this President will do and say anything and everything from now to election day in order to get re-elected, nation and people be damned.

Dangerous, indeed.

Vote blue, folks.

Quote of the Day -- On President Donald J Trump and This Pandemic

“That the pandemic occurred is not Trump’s fault.

The utter unpreparedness of the United States for a pandemic is Trump’s fault.

The loss of stockpiled respirators to breakage because the federal government let maintenance contracts lapse in 2018 is Trump’s fault.

The failure to store sufficient protective medical gear in the national arsenal is Trump’s fault.

That states are bidding against other states for equipment, paying many multiples of the precrisis price for ventilators, is Trump’s fault.

Air travelers summoned home and forced to stand for hours in dense airport crowds alongside infected people? That was Trump’s fault too.

Ten weeks of insisting that the coronavirus is a harmless flu that would miraculously go away on its own? Trump’s fault again.

The refusal of red-state governors to act promptly, the failure to close Florida and Gulf Coast beaches until late March? That fault is more widely shared, but again, responsibility rests with Trump: He could have stopped it, and he did not.”

The lying about the coronavirus by hosts on Fox News and conservative talk radio is Trump’s fault: They did it to protect him.

The false hope of instant cures and nonexistent vaccines is Trump’s fault, because he told those lies to cover up his failure to act in time.

The severity of the economic crisis is Trump’s fault; things would have been less bad if he had acted faster instead of sending out his chief economic adviser and his son Eric to assure Americans that the first stock-market dips were buying opportunities.

The firing of a Navy captain for speaking truthfully about the virus’s threat to his crew? Trump’s fault.

The fact that so many key government jobs were either empty or filled by mediocrities? Trump’s fault.

The insertion of Trump’s arrogant and incompetent son-in-law as commander in chief of the national medical supply chain? Trump’s fault.”

For three years, Trump has blathered and bluffed and bullied his way through an office for which he is utterly inadequate. But sooner or later, every president must face a supreme test, a test that cannot be evaded by blather and bluff and bullying. That test has overwhelmed Trump.

--David Frum, Canadian-American political commentator, speechwriter for President George W. Bush, conservative

Link:

David Frum - Wikipedia

"Hell to pay" in Kansas and the plains states

The New York Times ran an important article today (one more), this time on the Great Plains overall but Kansas, in specific, and how our water aquifers below ground are running dry:

Wells Dry, Fertile Plains Turn to Dust

Just a bit from the article:

HASKELL COUNTY, Kan. — Forty-nine years ago, Ashley Yost’s grandfather sank a well deep into a half-mile square of rich Kansas farmland. He struck an artery of water so prodigious that he could pump 1,600 gallons to the surface every minute.

Last year, Mr. Yost was coaxing just 300 gallons from the earth, and pumping up sand in order to do it. By harvest time, the grit had robbed him of $20,000 worth of pumps and any hope of returning to the bumper harvests of years past.

“That’s prime land,” he said not long ago, gesturing from his pickup at the stubby remains of last year’s crop. “I’ve raised 294 bushels of corn an acre there before, with water and the Lord’s help.” Now, he said, “it’s over.”

...Vast stretches of Texas farmland lying over the aquifer no longer support irrigation. In west-central Kansas, up to a fifth of the irrigated farmland along a 100-mile swath of the aquifer has already gone dry. In many other places, there no longer is enough water to supply farmers’ peak needs during Kansas’ scorching summers.

And when the groundwater runs out, it is gone for good. Refilling the aquifer would require hundreds, if not thousands, of years of rains.

This is in many ways a slow-motion crisis — decades in the making, imminent for some, years or decades away for others, hitting one farm but leaving an adjacent one untouched. But across the rolling plains and tarmac-flat farmland near the Kansas-Colorado border, the effects of depletion are evident everywhere. Highway bridges span arid stream beds. Most of the creeks and rivers that once veined the land have dried up as 60 years of pumping have pulled groundwater levels down by scores and even hundreds of feet.

On some farms, big center-pivot irrigators — the spindly rigs that create the emerald circles of cropland familiar to anyone flying over the region — now are watering only a half-circle. On others, they sit idle altogether.

Two years of extreme drought, during which farmers relied almost completely on groundwater, have brought the seriousness of the problem home. In 2011 and 2012, the Kansas Geological Survey reports, the average water level in the state’s portion of the aquifer dropped 4.25 feet — nearly a third of the total decline since 1996.

And that is merely the average. “I know my staff went out and re-measured a couple of wells because they couldn’t believe it,” said Lane Letourneau, a manager at the State Agriculture Department’s water resources division. “There was a 30-foot decline.”

And as it says above, we see this coming and we've seen it coming. There have been warnings. We can't go on like this forever. It isn't, it wasn't sustainable. We can't just take and take and take.

Something's got to change.

What has struck me most about our current situation, both about drought and the 2008 financial crisis, the worst in 80 years, since the Great Depression, is that it is, in those two ways--the financial crisis and drought--so very much like those years, the 30's. That is, people hurt by both the financial crisis and the drought.

In the case of the Depression, it was all man-made.

Turns out, really, it could be argued this one is, too.

As if that isn't enough, Robert Reich, writing from Europe today, posts the following on Facebook:

At a time when you'd expect nations to band together to gain bargaining power against global capital, the opposite is occurring: Xenophobia is breaking out all over. 

Here in Britain, the UK Independence Party -- which wants to get out of the European Union -- is rapidly gaining ground, becoming the third most popular party in the country, according to a new poll for The Independent on Sunday. Almost one in five people plan to vote for it in the next general election. Ukip's overall ratings have risen four points to 19 per cent in the past month, despite Prime Minister David Cameron's efforts to wrest back control of the crucial debate over Britain's relationship with the European Union. 

Right-wing nationalist parties are gaining ground elsewhere in Europe as well. In the U.S., not only are Republicans sounding more nationalistic of late (anti-immigrant, anti-trade), but they continue to push "states rights" -- as states increasingly battle against one another to give global companies ever larger tax breaks and subsidies. 

WWIII, anybody?

One last thing from Facebook today that wraps this all up:

Anyone care yet?

Additional link: 

When the Wells Go Dry in the Great Plains

On that debate last evening

Republican David Frum:

"I remember naively supporting Obama in 2008 because I hoped he cared about civil liberties and thought for the future. What we saw tonight was a conservative Democrat who fights to preserve the economy of the 20th century, a bipartisan consensus in favor of a foreign policy that endangers the America we love, and a Republican who could criticize the President but can't seem to figure out a way forward."

The sad state of American politics today.

Quote of the day (from a Republican)

"For 20 years now, the GOP has been giving away the votes of professionals, upper-income non-whites, college-educated women, and other comparatively economically successful groups.

The party has rebased itself on the votes of whites without a college degree. Mitt Romney must gain almost two-thirds of their vote in 2012 to have any realistic hope of winning the White House.

Non-college whites are the most alienated and pessimistic group in the electorate and also the most nationalist. They may resent the "foreigner" Barack Obama, but there is one thing they hate even more: outsourcing—and those who do it.

Tanner is right that free trade, including outsourcing, raises national income in the aggregate. But it does not raise the incomes of each and every one of us individually. Trade creates losers as well as winners. John Stuart Mill proposed a solution to this conundrum more than 150 years ago: trade freely, then tax the winners to compensate the losers. That solution is not congruent with the Cato Institute philosophy. Result: losers and prospective losers—and they know who they are!—fear outsourcing. The losers and prospective losers also happen to provide the GOP with much (or most) of its voting muscle.

You want to change that dynamic? You'll have to reorient the party to a new voting base—one that does not thrill to the music that the Romney campaign has been playing all this week." --David Frum, former writer for George W. Bush

Link to original article here: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/07/18/defend-capitalism.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

On David Frum: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Frum

Unsolicited advice for this President

The editors of The New York Times this weekend invited a number of people who have worked in politics to offer Obama suggestions as to how to turn things around. You always read a lot of ingenious offerings in these symposiums, but the true answer is not ingenious at all. Deliver prosperity, create jobs, and raise incomes; avoid wars, but when you fight them, win them; respond effectively to national disasters; keep clear of scandals. In short, do everything George W. Bush did not, could not or would not do. Link to original post: http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/07/19/frum.obama.troubles/index.html?eref=rss_topstories&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+rss/cnn_topstories+(RSS:+Top+Stories)