No Country For Old Men

     High ratings and viewer engagement do not necessarily translate to a worthy spectacle. Yes, CNN may have scored a ratings coup by somehow getting Donald Trump to agree to a debate for the first time in nearly four years. But the high visibility of the debate, which boasted of 50,000,000 viewers, also exposed CNN's failings.

     Spectacle should never be mistaken for necessity. Note the lead image above.

     That was the moment two locomotives were deliberately smashed into each other on September 15, 1896 in the briefly incorporated town of Crush, Texas. This idiotic stunt put on by the Katy Railroad was designed to publicize the Katy. It attracted tens of thousands of people from all over Texas and beyond and what no one seemed to have factored in was the possibility that one or both of the boilers could rupture and explode.

     Which was exactly what happened.

     Debris flew at the speed of bullets and landed hundreds of yards away. At least two people were killed. The photographer who took the lead image, Jervis Deane, lost an eye moments after snapping the picture. The executives who ran the Katy were all too well aware of the atavistic human tendency to passively watch disaster, albeit from a safe remove. This is why we hear to this day of idiots having picnics literally on Civil War battlefields as the bullets and mortars were flying around them.

     CNN was all too well aware of that, too. What they were blithely unaware of was the old journalism adage of not becoming the news. And, up to a point, they had by not only refusing to fact-check Trump but to even double down and defend that decision. CNN's position was that fact-checking was not their job despite employing Canadian fact checker Daniel Dale, who's based his entire career of late to fact-checking Trump and his constant fire hose of lies. 

     CNN also seems to have forgotten that their responsibility as a so-called news network is to give the people the facts and to not let serial liars go unchallenged for an hour and a half. Their refusal to even attempt to keep Trump on the straight and narrow almost made a mockery of the very definition of the word moderator. The whole idea of a presidential debate is to give the American voters a chance to hear each candidate's policy positions and achievements, not a pack of unchallenged lies.

     What we saw instead of an actual debate was the spectacle of Donald Trump walking all over the back of a strangely diminished Joe Biden. It led to the editorial boards of Raw Story and the New York Times for Biden to immediately drop out of the race if not resign the presidency. In fact, in a strange reversal, just yesterday, the day after the debate, Trump reverted back to his rambling incoherent ways at a rally in Chesapeake, VA while we got the strong Joe Biden of old at his rally in Raliegh, NC.

     But rallies and speeches aren't debates any more than debates are actual presidential administrations.

     Do we deserve better? In Biden's case, perhaps. In Trump's case? Absolutely.

     But the 2024 presidential campaign will be marked by the one, unavoidable object lesson in what happens when two very old men try to cling to power for too long and the poor choices given to the US electorate when those choices are made for us by two monolithic political parties.

     The Times' and Raw Story's editorial boards proved to be feckless and willing to 86 the president literally hours after the debate. They never seemed to factor in the fact that no replacement candidate would be able to use Biden's campaign funds, putting Democratic donors on their back foot, or what had happened the last time the Democratic Party replaced a major candidate at the last minute (The Eagleton debacle in '72).

     The editorial boards never even advanced their ideas for who on the Democratic side could plausibly beat Trump just 130 days before election day. The short answer is essentially nobody unless someone  can wave a magic wand and make Obama eligible to run for a third term.

     The bottom line is you don't ditch a man who'd capably run the country for three and a half years because he had one bad debate. Speaking of President Obama again, can anyone remember the first debate he had with Mitt Romney in 2012? Did the Democratic Party lose its collective shit and demand that Obama drop out of the race? Of course not. And the major difference was that 12 years ago, Obama wasn't old. Biden is.

     And this election cycle has betrayed the fecklessness of both parties, albeit in in diametrically opposite ways.

     The Republican Party has completely surrendered itself to Trump, a twice-impeached convicted criminal without the slightest sense of loyalty except to tinpot dictators and other criminals like him. They sang Happy Birthday to him and two weeks before that even dressed exactly like him outside the courthouse where he'd be convicted on 34 criminal counts.

     And, in stark contrast to the GOP's unwavering, cultish devotion to Trump, the Democratic Party looks like a bunch of wet-legged cunts for figuratively putting Joe Biden on an ice floe and pushing him out to sea and the so-called "liberal media" doesn't look any better.

     And the American people deserve better than spectacle for its own sake.