Debate Notes

The Face-Off Between The Trumpster and ¡Que Mala!

I suppose it would be too much to expect that, in the course of repeatedly warning the debate audience that Donald Trump would be telling lies, ¡Que Mala! Harris could refrain from lying herself.

She and her whole Democrat Party, as well as the Communist Party from which the Democrats are becoming evermore indistinguishable, are masters of projection. It has always served them well (and may be one of the secrets of their success) to accuse their opponents of precisely what they are, themselves, doing.

So there she was, not just lying but repeating the very lies that Joe Biden had told during his debate with Trump, lies that were long in the tooth and already debunked even then.

She used the famous Charlottesville lie, and the lie about Trump allegedly disparaging our fallen soldiers. And she lied about Jan. 6, not just about Trump inciting the “insurrection” (both Harris and her wingman, David Muir, managed to ignore the part of his speech where Trump urged his followers to march “peacefully and patriotically”), but also blatantly falsifying the number and type of casualties).

She also lied when she said that she and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim “No Balz” Walz, were both gun owners and that neither one “wants to take your guns,” when she is on record as favoring “mandatory gun buybacks.”

That particular lie had all the rhythm of the classic Democrat “Don’t be silly” defense. That’s often the Democrat response when Conservatives and others look down the road at where the Dems’ latest schemes are bound to lead. They’ve been using that defense for years and years.

When, for example, “gay rights” were first being demanded and demonstrated for, and some folks dared to ask, “What’s next? I suppose they’ll want to get married?”, the response was to laugh it off with “Oh, don’t be silly! They just want the freedom to love who they want to love!”

And when sexual misfits did achieve tolerance to the point that “gay marriage” became acceptable, they had to contend with folks who wondered, “So what’s next? Will they want to adopt and raise kids?”

That elicited another round of “Oh, don’t be ridiculous! It’ll never come to that!” The notion of a prominent citizen — the mayor of an American city — and his “husband,” being photographed in bed while “nursing” their newly-adopted infants (and while on “paternity leave”!) would have been laughed into the Hall of Fame of Ridiculousness. (That was when the notion was ridiculous; now that it’s become reality, it proves that ridiculousness has no limits.)

So the “Don’t be silly” tone of Harris’s denial of wanting to confiscate guns had all the brazenness one has come to expect from Harris, and even some of the snarkiness that is not only expected but comes through increasingly clearly when she begins to forget she promised herself and her handlers to refrain from her trademark cackling. There were a few times when that cackle almost started to come out, but she managed to restrain herself. She did not restrain herself, however, on those occasions, from letting her smugness show, in that insufferable grin.

In similar fashion, Trump managed to restrain his natural combativeness, and was in less than tip-top form because of it. Considering all that he’s been through — not the least of which was, not quite two months ago, having cheated death by a mere inch! — I can forgive him for not being on top of his game.

I was disappointed when he seemed to fail to sense when a trap was being set for him. ¡Que Mala! inviting people to attend a Trump rally, and suggesting the crowds were not as large or as attentive as claimed, seemed an obvious trap, and Trump took the bait, disputing her premise. But Harris didn’t go where I expected her to; I thought her plan was to reprise Barack Obama’s smarmy remark about Trump’s “weird obsession with crowd size” (with accompanying gesture, in case the phrasing and tone weren’t indecorous enough), but she failed to do so, so the trap wasn’t as effective as it might have been.

Another disappointment was Trump failing to draw attention to Harris’s blatant hypocrisy (not to mention her being utterly blind to the irony) in railing about the importance of national sovereignty and border integrity when speaking of Ukraine, when, as Czarina of our own Southern Border (ostensibly protecting our own national sovereignty and integrity) she has been an abysmal failure (that failure being a point that Trump returned to perhaps even too often).

I was also disappointed in Trump addressing Muir as “David,” as if the moderator were a friend, a benign presence, rather than an obvious partisan, ready to hand Harris a dagger or plunge it into Trump’s back himself.

And I was especially disappointed that Trump didn’t push back (the way I would have) to Muir’s repeated question, “Will you commit to wanting Ukraine to win the war?”

The moment I heard that, I was wishing that Trump had fired back, “Will you commit, David, and all the rest of you, Vice President Harris and all you Democrats and all your little friends in the media — will you commit to wanting to see Israel win its war, and vanquish and obliterate Hamas once and for all? Or will you tell us that there are ‘fine people on both sides’? How about it?”

ST