Welcome to clown world AKA the Democrat debates.

Posted by Pointman on July 4, 2019 · 15 Comments 

In a series of three articles, I recently ran the slide rule over the major and minor contenders for the Democrat ticket in 2020, as well as making some general observations. Having gone to the trouble of researching a field of mostly obscure mediocrities and scratching around to find something even faintly interesting, or at least amusing, to say about them, I felt obliged to watch the first round of debates between them, a decision I came to regret. They’re being billed as presidential debates, but since none of them are presidents nor at this moment ever look likely to be, the name was an affront to the high office of President of the United States, except perhaps if you were Jimmy Carter.

By the time the debate was to be held, the field of candidates who’d thrown their hat in the ring had swollen to a massive twenty-five, so it had to be split over two nights with twelve and a half candidates apiece. Lord only knows how many candidates there are by now. Scanning the five so-called moderators, I was surprised to find one of them was actually a man who was white. The remaining four consisted of two men and two women, with one of the latter being the queen of conspiracies and famously weeping lesbian Rachael Maddow. Tokenism at its very worst.

Given that mainstream journalism has degenerated down to being light entertainment for brain-dead couch potatoes feeding their face junk snacks, the only thing these people had in common was that they were all prominent performers to camera on news platforms whose viewing numbers were falling faster than the credibility the general public now places in fake news. Add in the fact that they’re all essentially left-wing propagandists on their various platforms, and I wasn’t expecting any particularly searching questions from them and surprise, surprise, there weren’t any.

Considering the motley crew of actors involved, I’d like to say it lived up to my modest expectations, but the actual event itself turned out to be dire in so many ways, so I’ll spare you a rerun of all the sordid details and just cover the salient events – I was about to say highlights rather than salient events, but sarcasm doesn’t leap out of prose too well. Wishing to protect you from the full horror, I’m not going to go through the candidates one by one, since they’ll mostly all be knocked out of the race in the coming months anyway to reenter the deranged margins of the twilight zone they originally emerged from, except perhaps this time permanently.

The one I watched the most carefully was Mr. Sniffy Gropey himself, Joe Biden. As I’ve said previously, he’s the DNC’s anointed one to go up against Trump in 2020 because they know that unless something changes, they haven’t got a fart’s chance in a raging furnace against him in that election, so they needed a patsy to take that bullet for the party. He’s not exactly an unwitting patsy and will no doubt be handsomely rewarded for playing the part of somehow having been cheated out of the presidency in 2020 with some dignity.

Asked a simple direct question, he’d come back with a suitably bland response, but if that question had two or more prepositions bolted onto the front of it, he visibly struggled to understand it at times. And the “moderators”, seeing it and having had their instructions from liberal central, soon backed off posing such complicated questions to him. Basically, he got a free pass, but you wouldn’t need to be a genius to see that Trump would make chopped meat of him in a real televised debate.

The only awkward moment came when Kamala Harris, once again displaying her complete lack of political smarts, attacked him by playing the race card by saying she was in the second year when her school was integrated and his voting record on race legislation wasn’t politically immaculate. In an obvious way, Harris managed to shoot herself in the foot because the school she went to had been integrated for decades and anyway, she was mostly educated in Canada. She seems prone to telling lies that are easily uncovered with less than five minutes of web research – remember her dope-smoking, snoop dogg listening college days she boasted about to boost her blackness credentials ten years before snoop dogg cut his first album?

The fake news establishment thought she’d upped her chances, but the internet was ablaze with digging out and excoriating her for the blatant lying.

In a deeper and more subtle sense, she simultaneously managed to shoot herself in the other foot because there was a faint sense of her using the race club to attack a doddery old white man, and by and large, people are fed up with race politics. Harris is stereotypical of the liar pathology, it’s always done to elevate their status and they’ve always been doing it, which means if you dig deep into their background, you’ll not find it hard to unearth more outrageous examples. I’ve no doubt that if by some chance she gets the ticket, the Trump campaign will get the mechanical digger out.

Bernie Sanders, as usual, lived up to that quip one of his own party made about him – he went to Russia for his honeymoon, but the problem is he never came back. Vote for me and if I win, I’ll raise taxes on the bourgeoisie, otherwise know as middle America, and redistribute it to various illegal immigrant or work shy groups. That’ll be a big vote winner Bernie, a really big one. The party elders decided they didn’t want to “feel the bern” in 2016, and they haven’t subsequently changed their minds either.

Apart from looking thunderously offended throughout the whole fashion show, his most interesting contribution was saying if he made it, he’d fire a few judges from the Supreme Court and replace them with I presume ones more sympathetic to his socialist ravings. The president, and it was deliberately framed that way at the insistence of the founding fathers because of something they valued above all else called the separation of powers, has no such authority under the constitution and having sat on his ass in Washington achieving absolutely nothing his whole life, he should have known that, but democracy and socialism are essentially incompatible bed fellows.

He’s never actually had a job outside politics, never had a blister on his hand or broken a fingernail doing an honest day’s work, but he’s still the darling of the socialists taking over the Democrat party, even if he owns three mansions, is worth more than a few million dollars and owns a lot of very very expensive cars. Yes, a classic champagne socialist. Up the workers and everything, but keep your fucking hands off my stuff. Trump reads him only too well, and on one of the few occasions when he’d ever deigned to throw him a bone by agreeing to a photo opportunity with him, teased him impishly by making him protect a single French fry.

Most of the pledges being given showed the total disconnect they suffer with people outside the Democrat bubble of self-righteousness. Raise your hand if you’d give free health care to illegal immigrants. Every right hand shot up in unison, as if there was a master puppeteer hidden up there somewhere in the rafters above the stage. Abortion was spun as exclusively a women’s health issue and as if to firmly stake out their territory on the lunatic fringe, one of them even nipped in to make the virtuous point that abortion should also be made freely available to trans men. You couldn’t make it up.

The one candidate, who on her past form of occasionally saying some sensible things, I’d placed some hope of a few solid policy promises, was Tulsi Gabbard, who boasted of voting for the Equality Act. If you’re not familiar with that brilliant piece of legislation, it’s the one that lets assorted men who’ve suddenly decided to identify as women, legal right to use female toilets, female changing rooms and also allows them to compete in women’s sports. Women’s sports have since become a complete joke as a result. Suddenly a man who was ranked 600th in the world as a sprinter, is world number one breaking all records in women’s sprinting. Oh dear Tulsi, that’s you flushed out from my people to watch in the future list. You turned out to be just another clown, but one with a better line of patter than the rest.

Elizabeth Warren, in her usual daffy fashion, proclaimed she wanted to abolish private health care and after her union backers, who’d fought for private health care for decades, got in touch, backtracked within hours with the rather miserable excuse that she’d misunderstood the question. Imagine the scenario, if you will – Madam President Warren, Pearl Harbor has just been attacked by the Japanese, I presume you’ll want to declare war on them? How many collegiate votes do these Japanese people have? Silence.

The big existential crisis they all heartily agreed on was Climate Change, which used to be called Global Warming, but since the globe stubbornly hasn’t warmed appreciably in the last twenty-five years, needed a rebrand to keep the research gravy train on the rails. As an issue of concern to voters, it’s been at the bottom of polls for years. Basically, voters don’t give a flying fuck about it these days, and are smart enough to realise who’ll have to ante up for trillion dollar proposals to save the Earth. They know it’d be them, which would mean even more taxes.

Possibly the most inane and toe-curling segment of the debates was on the economy. By any metric you’d care to choose, the American economy hasn’t been stronger in at least fifty years and yet they all with a straight face portrayed it as somehow being in crisis. Not one of them had the political smarts to admit what is obvious to everyone – Trump has done a good job. It would have given them some statesman gravitas, but instead their dishonesty projected them as partisan whiney bitches who hadn’t even the good grace to give a smidgen of praise where it’s obviously due.

The abiding impression of them all was not just that they’re part of the usual establishment Washington swamp, which they are, but that they appear to live in that liberal bubble that only looks inward for approval, never outwards. It’s delusional and insulated from reality. The implicit assumption seems to be everyone outside the bubble have their noses pressed against it, desperately wanting nothing more than to get in.

Newsflash, not everyone does.

Inside the bubble, things like raising taxes, more taxes to save the Earth, confiscating guns, suppressing what they deem to be hate speech, judicious infanticide, breaking down the traditional family, sexualising young children, burning the flag and drag queen storytime in libraries to pre-school children are all of course manifestly good ideas, but outside of it, they’re definitely not. If they want to get anywhere, they’re going to have to get outside the bubble.

There were many instances of the bubble mentality on show, but the most gorge raising and just throw up your dinner down the big white telephone to God, had to be when they all inexplicably decided to compete with each other speaking Spanish. On one side, you’d a plastic Paddy from Texas speaking 101 Spanish to rapturous applause from a hand picked liberal audience, and on the other a wide-eyed maniacal looking black dude from New Jersey whose pronunciation was so bad that for a moment I honestly thought he might be one of those sad internet bastards who speak Klingon. How to simultaneously insult English speaking America and give a patronising pat on the head to Americans of Hispanic descent. No es muy bueno, amigos.

What also came across to me was a the impression of how weak and wishy washy they all were. Yes, it was a televised debate and they all had to turn in a nicey nice televisual performance, but at times it felt like they were performing for the moderators, not the remaining viewers who’d not yet lost the will to live before the end of five hours of what felt at times like having one fingernail after another pulled off with a pair of rusty old pliers.

“Put your hands up if you believe in” some SJW policy would come from the moderators, and all the hands would shoot up in unison. It was like that Simon Said game. Simon says tap your head and rub your tummy, Simon says jump up in the air. In the end, if the moderators had shouted out Simon says show us your bums, there’d have been belts being unbuckled and skirts flicked up as boxer shorts and knickers went in the other direction as they turned and grabbed their ankles. Without hesitation.

It wouldn’t be a pretty sight, so it’s best if you don’t get that image stuck in your head, but on the other hand, if such a thing had actually happened, there’d be a lot more viewers watching the next debate than the last one.

As an example of that weakness, Andrew Yang was only asked one direct question and received the smallest of airtime, with the anointed one Mr Sniffy Gropey getting the most, of course. Yang complained his microphone was turned off all the time except when he was asked that one question. So this clown, who wants to represent America as its president, stood there in front of a turned off microphone for the whole debate and did absolutely nothing about it at the time? In the same situation, I could easily see Trump striding across the stage to Biden and borrowing his live microphone to tell the producer live on air to either keep his microphone on, or he’d walk off the show.

Contrast that weakness dealing with a fake news machine and the way Trump slaps them down when they think they’re the ones who set the agenda, as Trump did with CNN’s Jim Acosta at the recent G20 summit in Japan. Youtube seem to have hidden or disappeared footage of the interaction, so if you can find a link somewhere, put it in as a comment and I’ll wrap it into this article. Update – you can see the clip here, courtesy of Meltemian and Graeme No 3. Thank you both.

If I put my role reversal hat on, which I do a lot of, and pretend I’m a Democrat campaign strategist for 2020, what would I think after that two night marathon of debates? The objective would be to win in 2020 and my job would be to score that debate not according to the committed Dems watching and nodding their heads at every point scored, but to tell them it was a bloody disaster. You don’t get a nationwide television opportunity to convince your already dyed in the wool supporters – it’s to pull in the floating or undecided voter.

In politics, perception is all and the walk away perception from these two debates was that the party was promising open borders, free welfare and health care for life to illegals, to confiscate people’s guns, raising taxes, more money to save the Earth, banning private health insurance, taxes, more taxes, even more taxes and those items were just the highlights. What bloody planet do you have to be living on that you’d think that list of promises would entice Joe Doe the Undecided to vote for you?

There are simply too many candidates and again the walk away negative perception is of twenty-five dogs fighting over a single bone. What’s worse, and it will happen, is that the only way one of the dogs might get ahead of the feral pack is to propose even more extreme attention grabbing policies, which will then reinforce the growing perception that the party has become a socialist, if not a far-left party. Despite the fake news and media’s best efforts to present it as being otherwise, America is still basically a conservative moderate country. A recent poll came out with the result that less than 10% of the electorate approved of socialism, a word which by the way is nearly synonymous with communism in the American psyche.

None of what I saw showed the political smarts needed to beguile into their camp that middle ground of voters they simply have to capture to recover power in Congress. Quite the reverse actually.

©Pointman

Related articles by Pointman:

Series of articles on the Dem candidates for the 2020 ticket.

A decisive minority of idiots, fashionistas and the innocent.

The second great extinction of the liberal dream.

People are pissed off.

Click for a list of other articles.

 

Filed under Article · Tagged with Climate Change, Global Warming, The early Dem candidates for 2020