Well, at least nobody bothered with the usual leaden rituals of American presidential debate.
There was no "spin" ...other than this fairly half-hearted post-game revelation from NBC News:
NEW: Two sources familiar with the situation say "President Biden has a cold."
— Kelly O'Donnell (@KellyO) June 28, 2024
Apparently, the poor chap came down with a "cold" forty-five seconds before airtime. Maybe that rebound Covid he's prone to, or the avian flu.
And there was no "fact-checking", because we're way beyond that now:
"There was no inflation when I came into office" - Joe Biden, accepting full blame for inflation driving up costs for Americans
— Comfortably Smug (@ComfortablySmug) June 28, 2024
On the other hand, he did claim that he "finally beat Medicare".
And, most significantly, there was none of the usual pushback when the subject of Biden's "cognitive decline" comes up. At that point, the bigshots fan out to assure us that I've worked for fourteen US presidents and Joe is undoubtedly the sharpest; he's always the smartest guy in the room and on top of every brief and, whenever I think I can skate by on a few generalities about Ukraine, Joe peppers me with incredibly forensic questions about troop movements in towns in the Donbass I've barely even heard of; etc. Not a lot of that last night, even from Kamala:
🚨KAMALA HARRIS JUST WENT ON CNN AND THREW JOE BIDEN UNDER THE TRUMP TRAIN!
"Yes, there was a slow start."
They are SETTING the stage to REPLACE Biden!
Joe Biden definitely doesn't want you to share this! pic.twitter.com/PpbwqkH2qu
— Bo Loudon (@BoLoudon) June 28, 2024
The New York Times' take:
A Fumbling Performance, and a Panicking Party
Dems freak out over Biden's debate performance: 'Biden is toast'
The moderators did their best. Here's Dana Bash signaling to Joe the direction in which to point his head:
Watch CNN anchor hand signal Joe on where to look pic.twitter.com/QDhyZ2SNJ6
— TacoBill's Pic of the Day (@JerseyBillz) June 28, 2024
Was there anyone else on the stage? Not so's you'd know from the headlines. Biden lost to himself. And considering that the object was to make the debate all about Trump that's quite an accomplishment.
So what's going on? Why did whoever's running the show allow this to happen?
I've been of the view, ever since the 2020 primary season, that Biden is the Permanent State's conscious response to Trump: in 2016, Trump was all candidate and no minders; Biden is all minders and no candidate. In that sense, the dead husk of a moth-eaten sock-puppet is the perfect embodiment of American politics. We can do all the cracks about "Obama's third term" or "the Manchurian candidate", but the truth is that, in a supposedly self-governing republic of 350 million people, we have absolutely no idea who's actually running the show - other than the fact that, out of those 350 million, the only one we can definitively rule out of having anything to do with it is the purported head of the executive branch.
You have to figure that that's greatly to the advantage of the Deep State, and that's why they'd like to keep it that way. It's quite something to teach the people the lesson that representative politics is just a meaningless joke, third-rate dinner-theatre in which all the faux-combat is an obvious sham. In the Soviet Union, the point wasn't to persuade you to believe the lie but to force you to live with the lie. Reducing the two-year US election cycle to the same state inflicts an even more brutal humiliation on the masses.
So why weren't they able, after a week-and-a-half of dosage experimentation, to shoot the stiff enough of the juice to pass him off as being back in his State of the Union top-of-the-game mode?
As my former GB News colleague Neil Oliver observed long ago on The Mark Steyn Show, formulating a useful rule of contemporary politics:
This is happening because they want it to happen.
Why would that be? Well, maybe because they've decided it's time to move on to the next plot twist. Never-Trumper Michael Brendan Dougherty at National Review:
Trump May Have Done Too Much Winning Tonight
Oh, no! They laid the trap and he walked right into it!
Right now, MSNBC and CNN post-debate panels are openly talking about options for pressuring Biden to withdraw, or party officials conspiring to replace him at the convention anyway ...and the selection between Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom would allow Democrats to feel like the party of the future again...
Could be, I suppose. But it's important to bear in mind that there is no rational justification for this sudden "panic". The squinting croaking zombie has been out of it for almost his entire "presidency": at the G7 and the like, it's accepted by every other nation that he will play no part in meaningful discussions and attend only one or two of the photo-ops, at which Meloni or Macron will be alerted to steer him back to the podium should he wander off because a comely six-year-old daughter of a deputy-assistant-under-commissioner of EU paper-shuffling has caught his eye.
And what's the net result of all that? Right now the non-dead candidate of the opposition party is one-point-five points ahead in the Real Clear Politics poll of polls - and that's well within the Democrats' margin of fraud when the late-arriving ballots start being motored around in unmarked vans in the early hours of Wednesday morning.
In other words, an amazingly solid core of American voters are either ignorant of or relaxed about the prospect of Second Term at Bernie's. Will this debate seriously shift those numbers?
We come back to some very basic calculations here, starting with the most basic of all:
Is the Democrat-Deep State-Big Tech complex willing to permit a free and fair election that Trump could win?
The answer to that remains: No. They've taken him off state ballots, they've raided his home, they've indicted him, gag-ordered him, convicted him of "crimes" that carry long gaol sentences, threatened to strip him of Secret Service protection, and are preparing to sentence him a couple of days before his party's convention. George S Kaufman observed of the Germans after their invasion of Russia that they were shooting without a script. Not here, not in the essentials: there are four months to go and they will do what's necessary.
The guys running this soap opera know the ending they're working up to, and any unexpected plot twists en route are designed to serve that end.
~Programming note: Join Steyn tomorrow, Saturday, for a musical preview of both Dominion Day and Independence Day on his Serenade Radio show, On the Town. The fun starts at 5pm British Summer Time - which is 6pm in Western Europe/12 midday North American Eastern. You can listen from almost anywhere on the planet by clicking the button at top right here.