Thermostatic Politics

A News Roundup

Two old men arguing about golf.

I have a roundup of interesting links that have been building up, and just to clear them out, I’m going to try to be very disciplined today and offer just a few sentences of commentary on each. The articles themselves are well worth reading, so please follow the link.

But first a quick note about Thursday night’s debate.

I didn’t rush to write anything about it, because I don’t think I have anything to say that is particularly different. The general consensus is that Biden looked feeble, and Trump lied.

Biden’s answers were rambling, and I didn’t even watch this far, but apparently at the end it devolved into two old men arguing about golf, which a more disciplined candidate wouldn’t have done.

Debating Trump is a difficult thing. You have to largely ignore him and talk to the moderators and the audience, sticking to a central message of your choosing. And when you do respond to him, you have to cut through his Gish Gallops of falsehoods and target only the few choice lies whose refutation serves your purpose. It requires a certain amount of discipline and focus—two things that have never been Biden’s strong suits and were not in evidence Thursday night.

I still reject the conclusion that Biden has dementia, because dementia is something different and worse, as those who’ve seen it in their loved ones know. It’s not just “Grandpa kind of rambles a lot.” Moreover, being undisciplined and inarticulate is not all that new for Biden (or for his opponent). If you read the transcript of the debate, he doesn’t seem as bad. But if you watched him, he looked and sounded old and feeble—older and feebler than Trump.

The Trump team has been preparing the ground for this with a drumbeat of claims that Biden is senile. (Simultaneously, they prepared the ground for a strong Biden debate performance by suggesting he is taking performance-enhancing drugs. Trumpism is an unfalsifiable hypothesis.) Much of the basis for this is false, including deceptive editing of videos. I have been warning you for a while that right-wing media is lying to you.

But Biden couldn’t afford to give any credence to these suggestions, and he did. This has led to a lot of panic among Democrats, who are now talking about replacing him at the convention. But nobody has a specific, realistic idea about who would replace him, how it would not be Kamala Harris, and how Democrats would accomplish this without tearing themselves apart in an acrimonious conflict. So it’s probably not going to happen.

Meanwhile, Trump continued to produce his normal firehose of lies, catalogued in The Bulwark. One of them was about his “very fine people” comments on the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, and I was happy to see the CNN fact-checker tweet out my definitive article on that (which some people are still stubbornly resisting). I found it especially amusing that Trump says, “Every reasonable anchor has debunked it,” because one of the people who has recommended my article is Jake Tapper, the “reasonable anchor” who was standing right in front of Trump as one of the moderators of the debate.

The upshot is