Right now, go to YouTube and watch any of the past
Presidential Debates from 1960 to 2012. Do it now, otherwise, you will forget
what a debate is supposed to be like, how candidates for the Presidency should behave, and how we once were.
About halfway through last night’s presidential
debate I went out and lit the grill. It was only six forty-five, but I couldn’t
take much more. After the debate, I switched back and forth between CNN, Fox
News and MSNBC. I don’t know why I do that, it just churns the stomach. I
proved once again that we live in two different countries. Fox was playing
toddy to Trump and MSNBC was Biden’s fawner.
The debate itself wasn’t a debate. I’ve never seen
anything like it and I’ve been watching these things for a long time. If there
had been a chair or stool on the stage, Biden could have sat on it the whole
hour and a half, said nothing, and won the debate by a landslide and the thanks
of a grateful nation. My taste in national policy is fairly moderate with hints
of liberalism. It’s my East Coast Republican upbringing, I guess. I wanted to hear what President Trump’s
policies for the next four years would be, and what Biden proposed for the same
period. I heard neither.
What I heard was the kind of behavior you might
expect from a three-year-old brat who didn’t get his ice cream cone when he
wanted it. To say the least, the President’s behavior was embarrassing for the
nation and a scary moment for our democracy. It was not presidential either.
Biden’s call for the President to “shut up” wasn’t the best he could do and
didn’t show the respect that the office deserves.
This nation is divided. We all know that. We need
someone to bring us together. The nation has elements that spew white supremacy;
we need someone to bring us together. The President suggested that The Proud
Boys should back off, but “stand by.” You can’t get more racist than that. He didn’t
denounce them: instead, he gave them legitimacy.
The validity of the election continued to be
questioned, even as people are voting in some states. The broadcast was an
opportunity to stop the illegitimate rant against vote-by-mail. One gets the
impression that some think this is the first time people have voted by mail.
Some states have been doing it for years. Some of us haven’t voted in person
for decades. The most precious action a person can take in a free nation is to vote. The process is being
degraded by the nation's leader, and that is not good for the union. It is the behavior
seen in totalitarian countries, not free nations. Hundreds of thousands of
people are marching in the streets of Minsk to protest a President who muddied
the vote counting to remain in office.
We were once the leader of the free world, a shining
city on the hill, a beacon for the oppressed. We are behaving like a dimly lit
hamlet in a deep valley. Watch the Nixon-Kennedy debate to see the contrast, to
see what we could be. The difference is stark.
