By LeManna @Adobe Stock
Michael Hirsh of Foreign Policy reports that Thursday night’s Presidential Debate felt like a true nosedive into the ground, an actual air disaster, with all the smoke and fire and debris and attendant loss of life. Biden looked and sounded more than at any previous time like a man on the verge of dementia. The U.S. is in a bad place, and it’s far worse than people think. Hirsh writes:
One candidate lied repeatedly, and the other could barely make his way through a single sentence. Each man mocked the other as unfit for world leadership and then bizarrely, as if they were a pair of doddering Florida retirees, bickered over who had the lower golf handicap. If there were ever a lower moment in the history of U.S. presidential politics—and there have been plenty of low moments over 248 years—I’m not sure what it was.
Yet in the longer run, Thursday night’s debate between U.S. President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump probably won’t matter all that much—and not just because we’ll all be dead. The reality is that the fundamentals of the republic remain strong, and the United States remains the world’s premier superpower.
But first things first. In the race to the bottom that is the 2024 U.S. presidential election, Thursday night felt like a true nosedive into the ground, an actual air disaster, with all the smoke and fire and debris and attendant loss of life. The most obvious casualty was Biden, whose campaign pushed for the unusually early debate in an effort to demonstrate that he is, at age 81, up for a second term. […]
Biden delivered the opposite message: With his frozen, senescent face and his jumbled and often incoherent answers, the president looked and sounded more than any previous time like a man on the verge of dementia. It was the Democrats’ worst nightmare.
Almost from the first moments of the debate, with Biden hoarse and stumbling from the start, his poor performance resurrected all the familiar calls for him to step aside. “The collective freak-out from Democrats is at the highest level you can imagine,” political pundit Amy Walter said on PBS News Hour. But Biden, who has rebuffed all previous suggestions that he’s too old to run again, appeared unready to admit defeat. “I think we did well,” he told reporters afterward, although when asked if he was feeling ill, Biden responded: “I have a sore throat.” […]
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