Dakota Beacon

Most of us have, by now, seen the first presidential debate.  It was more of an asymmetrical tag-team event, though, with Trump debating both Biden and Biden’s willing assistant, moderator Chris Wallace.  The evening was rife with rude insults, Biden referring to Trump as a “clown” and telling him to “shut up”.  Trump, on his end, told Biden not to use the term “smart” in reference to himself, citing some of his various lies about his educational career.  The talk-over was constant, which was to be expected.  

Who won?  Well, that is not easy to say.   Trump’s hard-core base thinks he did, of course, Biden’s wishful thinkers believe that he did.  The truth is that Trump could have been better and Biden could have been worse.  Trump could have helped Biden be worse by taking Biden’s advice and “shutting up”.  One kept wishing he would just quietly stand there and let Biden ramble in the woods until he ran out of breadcrumbs.  If Trump is anything , however, it is not restrained.  Too bad because this time he missed an opportunity to show the public what their choice is.  Biden?  Well, he remained “mostly coherent”, which is an amazing feat for him but an amazingly awful thing to have to say about anyone proposing to lead the world’s superpower.  

Trump was effective when he brought up the riots - Biden called Antifa “not an organization but an ‘idea’”, and Trump countered with, “getting hit with a baseball bat is not an idea”, which about summed that up.  He also tried to put Hunter Biden’s deeds in perspective, but in a debate it is difficult to present the facts and their relevancy, so much of this was probably lost.  The same goes for the balloting fraud that is going on.  James O’Keefe just presented an expose of the fraud in MInneapolis, largely benefitting Biden and Ilhan Omar, but this is not by any means a local problem.  It is becoming increasingly obvious that it is widespread and will likely bring the election itself into doubt.  This is one of the most toxic things we could have done in a totally toxic year.  COVID 19 should not have been permitted to bring our republic to a standstill.

COVID itself was a topic which used a considerable amount of air time in the debate, with Biden attacking Trump and blaming COVID deaths on him, Trump coming back with the fact that when he did shut down travel from China he was called a “xenophobe” for doing so, which act he believes saved many thousands of lives.  Other Biden attacks included the spurious claim that Trump advocated injecting bleach.  This is baseless.  He never advocated this.  Trump, on his part, suggested that the delay in some quarters on vaccine development was designed to impact the election, by delaying it until after the election.  

The fact checkers will be at work today, mostly trying to find errors in Trump’s statements, but the truth is largely with him.  The charges of racism hinted at by Wallace and cast by Biden are not believable, unless you are trying desperately to rationalize support for Biden - nothing Trump has done could possibly be construed as “racism” and yet Trump failed to put it across to the public that he has done a great deal more than most to lower minority unemployment, bring jobs back. to the benefit of minorities.  He defended his rejection of “critical race theory” training because he maintains that it teaches hate . . . which it does.  Not everyone is familiar with this - it is not “sensitivity” or “diversity” training - it is an aggressive anti-American and also anti-white movement, a Marxist strategy to divide Americans.  Wallace implied that Trump’s refusal to further implement this - a poisonous idea in line with the toxic White Fragility - was some kind of indication of sympathy with white supremacy or racism.  Again, this is not something the average viewer would have been studying, unless, of course, it had affected him or infected his children (this is also being used in schools).  Wallace added to this his support for Biden's charge that Trump supported white supremacists - one of the most egregious moments of the night.  

It was unsurprising that Wallace steered away from foreign policy issues as much as possible.  If he had gone there it would have been difficult to keep Trump quiet about his successes with the Pacific rim nations in their counter to Chinese aggression, the decline of Chinese influence worldwide, the continuing withdrawal under Trump of American combat and Trump’s three nominations within recent weeks for a Nobel Peace Prize.  There would have been little comeback there for Biden.  

What I wish had been covered better:  Biden’s and Trump’s proposals for countering domestic terrorism, the involvement of the CCP in recent riots, the investigation and arrest of various CCP operatives within the U.S., the importance of foreign policy on our domestic climate.  I would have liked Trump to ask the obvious question about electric cars - without the coal plants, where will you find sufficient electrical power to charge them (the wall outlet??) and how would you like to have a car charged up enough for about ten miles of driving and need to escape one of California’s wildfires?  Or escape any other kind of danger, to say nothing of getting to work on time.  Biden did kick the Green New Deal to the curb, which may temporarily irritate AOC, but we needn’t take that too seriously - after all he embraces it on his campaign website.  Same goes for his weak tea support of police.  If he wants to send social workers to crime scenes with them, he’s not really in support of stopping crime.  “Re-imagine” is another word for “defund”.

It was a night of missed opportunity - blows which should have been landed (which Chris Wallace would probably have intercepted anyway) and Trump’s failure to allow Biden to ramble on.  That would also have been intercepted by Wallace whenever Biden lost his train of thought.  Wallace would have jumped right in.  It was just not in the cards that this would be an objective debate.  

Something should be said about the disgraceful performance of Chris Wallace.  When Trump observed, “Well, I guess now I’m debating with you,” he about summed it up.  It looked really bad.  

Will there be another?  Well, there are supposed to be a couple more and one of Pence and Harris as well.  Worth watching?  Perhaps only academically.  We can expect no better moderating and it doesn’t reward our investment all that much.  They seem to be characterized by a skewed moderator, Biden lying blatantly, Trump bragging a bit, both of them insulting each other and demonstrating a rudeness that is difficult to watch.  This one does not seem to have moved the needle any one way or the other among the “undecided” voters and changed the minds of very few.

It all makes me compare this to the Reagan-Carter debates.  We are not getting better - we are going downhill from 1980.  Why can’t we hope for better from our leaders?  Perhaps because this is how we have allowed our children to be taught for far too long.  There are consequences.

Comments?  (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)