President Biden said on Howard Stern’s radio show that he would debate Donald Trump, and Trump, who has been bellowing that he wants to debate President Biden, basically said he is ready to accept President Biden’s challenge anytime or any place. I am ambivalent or have multiple thoughts on this subject of “To debate or not to debate?” And while I am no speech and debate champion, I will provide you Dear Reader with the penny worth of my meager wisdom.
Let’s be honest here. Biden debating Trump normalizes everything Trump has done and stands for: fascism, insurrection, and political violence. The Overton Window gets pushed way too far to the right with an officially sanctioned “debate” between a man who wants to protect democracy and another who wants to end it. It tells the idiots who 1) are double haters and 2) low information “swing voters” that Biden is just the same as Trump, except where policy is concerned.
Meanwhile, even Liz Cheney gets it that there is no equivalency between Biden and Trump. The only real option for American is to vote for Biden. Otherwise, a vote for Trump ends our democracy. So what is there to debate?
Next, one of the so called pillars of our democracy (the media) is demanding that Biden debate Trump. Once again, the media would be televising the debates and giving their stamp of approval of Trump being a legitimate presidential candidate. This is bad enough, but the media has a track record of aiding and abetting Donald Trump since 2016 for nothing more than ratings and subscriptions.
Even worse, some of the media outlets screaming for debates between Biden and Trump are openly hostile to President Biden. As others have pointed out, the publisher of the NYT, A.G. Sulzberger, is at war with President Biden because Biden will not sit down for an interview with the NYT. It’s the real reason that the NYT has been publishing articles over and over again stating that Biden is too old to be president. Although this may be taken out of context, I want to share with you a quote from Elisabeth Bumiller of the NYT’s Washington Bureau:
Biden aides largely view the election as an existential choice for the country, high stakes that they believe justify tougher tactics toward the Times and the press as a whole. Some Times reporters have found themselves cut off by sources after publishing pieces the Bidens and top aides didn’t like. Columnist Maureen Dowd, for example, complained to colleagues that she stopped hearing from White House officials after a column on Hunter Biden. For many Times veterans, such actions suggest that the Trump era has warped many Democrats’ expectations of journalists.
“They’re not being realistic about what we do for a living,” Bumiller told me. “You can be a force for democracy, liberal democracy. You don’t have to be a force for the Biden White House.”
Now, think about that for a moment. Who the fuck else is running against Trump, an evil man intent on destroying our democracy? Who is the ONLY one to stand a chance to keep our democracy going? It won’t be RFK Jr, Jill Stein, or Cornell West. It will be only President Joe Biden. By logical extension, if you are for democracy, YOU HAVE TO SUPPORT PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN!
Anyone expect a fair and impartial analysis of debates between President Biden and Donald Trump from the media, especially the NYT?
And the list of the other media outlets is not any better than the NYT. Here is the list of those yammering for debates between Biden and Trump:
ABC News is among a unified grouping of the five chief broadcast and cable news networks, along with major wire, print and radio organizations, that have penned an open letter asking presidential candidates to publicly commit to taking part in televised debates ahead of the general election.
In addition to ABC News, the letter is signed by CBS News, CNN, NBCUniversal News Group and FOX News Media, along with The Associated Press, C-SPAN, NewsNation, Noticias Univision (Univision Network News), NPR, PBS NewsHour and USA TODAY.
They actually still call Fox “news.” The TV network that pushed Trump’s Big Lie and was shown in court to be in on the lie. Then there is CBS which is still under the corporate culture from the fired Les Moonves. You may remember this from Moonves about Trump’s 2016 Election campaign:
Donald Trump’s candidacy might not be making America great, CBS Chairman Les Moonves said Monday, but it’s great for his company.
"It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS," Moonves said at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference in San Francisco, according to The Hollywood Reporter — perfectly distilling what media critics have long suspected was motivating the round-the-clock coverage of Trump's presidential bid.
"Most of the ads are not about issues. They're sort of like the debates," Moonves said, noting, "[t]here's a lot of money in the marketplace."
And there was the recent hiring then firing of Ronna McDaniel by NBC. The corporate executives want to get MAGA lunatics to watch NBC, so they thought getting the former RNC Chief and Trump boot licker would be oh so wonderful. The good news is the journalists and reproters at MSNBC staged a mutiny and killed that hire.
As for NPR and PBS, I stopped listening and watching those news outlets after Republicans took over congress after 1994. The threat of losing funding neutered the news coverage, and when I did listen to NPR a few times under Trump (long car trips from a past job made it one of the few stations I could pick up on the radio), it sickened me that the reporters there could not use the word “lie” to describe what Trump was doing during his term in office.
With regards to USA TODAY, the Gannett organization bought out the local newspaper The Louisville Courier-Journal years ago. It was once a great newspaper, but know, it’s a carbon copy of USA TODAY. And it provides no real in depth coverage of local, state, or national news. If I had a fire place, I would use it only to start fires.
And you may or may not have noticed by now, I don’t think all that much of televised political “debates.” In America, what we have are actually joint press conferences. The candidates don’t really debate one another (it is never the Lincoln/Douglas debates).
But the presence of Donald Trump in those events is nothing but a chance for Trump to run amok. Have any of the “moderators” at the debates been able to control Trump? Trump just does what he always does: bellows, filibusters, looms (remember what he did to Hillary Clinton?), and gish gallops.
Given all of the above, a large part of me says, “FUCKING NO WAY!” to so called political debates between Biden and Trump.
However, I do acknowledge that debates between Biden and Trump may finally show the idiotic voters who do not give politics a nanosecond of their brain time to ponder a chance to see Trump fall apart on live TV. Despite Biden’s physical age, there is nothing wrong with Biden’s cognitive abilities. Trump, on other hand, is clearly showing signs of cognitive decline if not out and out dementia. And I am betting this is what Biden and his team are banking on, and it is why Biden has said he will debate Trump.
Of course if the media decided to show more of Trump’s rallies and the gibberish that flows from out of his pie hole more often, American voters might figure it out for themselves that Trump has dementia. And this would require the media NOT to edit or try to explain what Trump is really saying. There is plenty of evidence of Trump losing the ability to form real words.
But I digress.
Anyway folks, those are my thoughts on this subject. Feel free to comment if you like.