It says something about last night’s debate that today there is more discussion of the fly on Mike Pence’s head than about whatever it was they discussed.

Jeff Darcy, Cleveland.com

I confess I wasn’t totally knocked out by Harris’s performance, but she won (IMO) mostly because Pence — who lied his ass off — assumed he was entitled to talk over the women, Harris and moderator Susan Page. And because hardly anything about the debate was memorable except for the fly.

Right-wing media today are hooting that Pence “destroyed” Harris. Everybody else says Harris did what she needed to do. It was a debate that won’t move any needles; if you support Trump you still support Trump; if you support Biden you still support Biden. But since Trump is way behind right now, Pence’s efforts on his behalf were a waste of time.

And I don’t believe Republican men grasp how bad it makes them look when they disrespect women by talking over them. Maybe someday they’ll figure it out.

The big news this morning is that the mostly worthless debate commission declared the next debate will be virtual, and Trump promptly declared he wouldn’t do it.

This might cheer you up — here is the “chance of winning” chart from FiveThirtyEight’s presidential forecast today (blue is Biden, red is Trump).

FiveThirtyEight.com, showing presidential election chances from June 1 to October 7. Biden is blue, Trump is red. https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-election-forecast/

The nerds also are forecasting that Biden will get 342 Electoral College votes to Trump’s 196. Works for me. Of course, that all depends on votes being counted.

The Hill reported yesterday that the Trump campaign canceled planned television ads in Ohio and Iowa “to instead focus funding in states where polls show the president trailing Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.” However, both the nerds (Biden 52%, Trump 48%) and the RCP average (Biden up by 0.6) are calling Ohio a tossup. The nerds have Trump slightly favored to win Iowa, but the RCP average has Biden up by 1.4. The Trump internal polls must be showing something very different, or else Trump is still running out of money. “Meanwhile, the Biden campaign will spend $1 million on ads in Ohio and $565,000 in Iowa over the next week while the president’s ads will not air,” says The Hill.

Democrats are slightly favored to win the Senate. Fingers crossed. The trajectory is encouraging.

October 7, 2020, https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-election-forecast/senate/

See also the Cook Political Report, The South Carolina Senate Race Moves to Toss Up.

Dems are clearly favored to keep the House and might increase their majority. The House odds have changed very little over the past several weeks.

Republicans have expressed concern. The Hill:

Republicans are growing increasingly concerned about poll numbers that show a rising Democratic wave just four weeks before Election Day as President Trump suffers one of the most brutal two-week stretches of his first term at precisely the wrong moment.

For months, Republicans and Democrats alike have confidently predicted that former Vice President Joe Biden’s lead in national and battleground state polls would tighten.

But after a new string of jarring numbers, some Republicans are beginning to fear that voters hesitant to say they will back Trump are not coming home and that the few remaining undecided voters are breaking decidedly against him — and the Republican Party as a whole.

Aw, poor babies. Yes, everyone had expected the race to tighten after labor day. But then the New York Times got the tax returns. And then we passed 200,000 dead from the pandemic. And then Trump refused to say he would cede power if he lost the election. And then there was the debate, which increasingly is looking like a worse bomb than the time Gerald Ford misplaced Poland. And then Trump turned into a virus superspreader.

Plus, the Hill continues, “There are growing signs that Trump’s dismal polling is beginning to impact down-ballot Republican contests.” Heh. See also Sam Stein and Lachlan Markay, Republicans: Ditch Trump, Save the Senate at Daily Beast.

Trump’s move yesterday to cancel relief/stimulus negotiations was labeled “the single greatest political blunder in the history of presidential elections” by Jonathan Chait. More soberly, Nate Silver writes,

But it’s still a hard move to comprehend, especially at a time when the president’s numbers were already declining — mildly in some polls, and sharply so in others. And the way Trump went about it makes matters worse for him, politically. Up until this point, House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi had faced at least a little bit of a risk: Though the stimulus might have helped Trump, she could have been partly blamed if talks collapsed. But now, Trump’s tweets make it clear that he was the one who pulled out of the talks.

This move was stupid even by Trump standards, and with Nancy Pelosi I do wonder what the dexamethasone is doing to him. For whatever reason, a slight majority of the electorate still preferred Trump over Biden to run the economy. Nate Silver says he might have blown that one advantage yesterday.

Within hours, Trump had partly shifted, calling for a deal to rescue the airline industry. He also tweeted yesterday about another paycheck protection program and a stand-alone bill to hand out another $1,200. The chances of any of this happening before the election seem low to me. See also Trump Just Killed the Stimulus Talks. Is He Out of His Mind? by Jim Newell and Jordaon Weissmann at Slate.

Tonight is the Veep debate. Should be more watchable than that mess last week.

What happened at the White House last night was, basically, the Bible Stunt without the Bible. Let’s call it the South Portico Stunt.

If you were watching television yesterday evening during the news hour, you must have seen it. NBC Nightly News covered the move from Walter Reed to the White House door to door. Trump walked from the helicopter to the South Portico wearing a mask, but at the door he took it off and posed for pictures — waving, saluting, sticking his thumbs up, affecting a heroic scanning-the-horizon pose. In close-up videos he appeared to me to be fighting to breathe.

I have read that a video of the South Portico Stunt with thunderous and triumphal orchestral music was quickly posted to Trump’s Twitter account. I didn’t look.

Trump and his infection return to the White House.

It is entirely possible they’ll be hauling him back to Walter Reed on a stretcher by the end of the week, but we’ll see.

Greg Sargent points out that the South Portico Stunt appears to have been designed to help Trump sell the idea that there will be a vaccine available by election day.

Top White House officials are blocking strict new federal guidelines for the emergency release of a coronavirus vaccine, objecting to a provision that would almost certainly guarantee that no vaccine could be authorized before the election on Nov. 3, according to people familiar with the approval process.

Trump portrayed his return as a moment of extraordinary personal valor. One video displayed his arrival by helicopter as akin to that of a conquering hero. The other showed him addressing (prematurely, perhaps) his vanquishing of the virus, declaring: “Don’t be afraid of it.”

But, crucially, Trump also insisted that we will “beat it” because “we have the best medicines,” and “the vaccines are coming momentarily.”

The subtext to this is that Trump is losing. He is really, really losing. With less than a month to go, today the FiveThirtyEight nerds have his chances to be be reelected at 17 to 100. That’s the worst the odds have been for Trump since ever. The debate hurt him, and he is not getting a sympathy bump for getting sick. He doesn’t know how to be president, so all he’s got are stunts.

And it may be that he really is doing very well and doesn’t need to be at Walter Reed, but it’s much more likely his condition is worse than everyone is letting on, and he was the only one who thought leaving Walter Reed was a good idea. If his physical condition were that remarkably good, one suspects the White House doctor would be posting lung x-rays and blood test results and whatever on Twitter instead of refusing to answer direct questions about them.

The reviews:

Monica Hesse, WaPo:

Robin Givhan, WaPo:

Marina Hyde, The Guardian:

A rare moment of unity in the US election, as Donald Trump marked his return to the White House by gasping along with his detractors. On Monday night, the president puffed up the front staircase of his residence, his face coated in several more gallons of paint than the front elevation of the building. “Don’t let it dominate your lives,” he panted of the virus, a bad case of which tends to dominate your death.

Yet there he was, this hideous kink in the arc of history, giving the most dangerous balcony performance since Michael Jackson had his baby crowdsurf off one. The American people are all Blanket now.

David Graham, The Atlantic:

The mask is off. After months of flirting with the notion, Trump is now explicit about his plan for the pandemic: He has none. He wants Americans to take the punch, take the deaths, and pretend all is fine. Trump is acting as though he has triumphed over the virus, and thus the rest of the country can too. But with his words and acts, he is making it likely that more Americans will die.

Josh Marshall, TPM:

President Trump seems to be knocking off iconic (and not in a good way) moments in rapid succession now: the Lafayette Park church stunt in June, the slow speed base runabout in his armored SUV two days ago, and then last night’s Triumph of the Will manque set piece with Trump, bathed in light but also clearly struggling to breathe, triumphantly reentering the White House and confidently tossing off his mask. While the June incident long predated Trump’s personal health crisis, each moment shares a common theme: Trumpian efforts to demonstrate strength and dominance which fail because they claim too much, because Trump is in fact weak. And it shows.

We may say that Trump is a weak man in general. But here I speak specifically of political weakness. Trump is weak. He’s losing his reelection battle. He has tried for months to reverse his political decline with sometimes cartoonish abuses of powers. While he has largely gotten away with the abuses in legal terms (so far) they’ve failed politically. The St. John’s Church photo op was part of Trump’s effort to shift the tide of the election into a referendum on “Law and Order,” hearkening back to Richard Nixon’s campaigns in 1968 and 1972. Many Democrats feared this would work. But it hasn’t. In general it hasn’t worked because most Americans believe the George Floyd protests on balance have merit and because most see Trump as a source of chaos and disorder rather than a protector from it.

Also, I think most Americans realize by now that Trump is an asshole. And the only people who like assholes are other assholes.

I take it they’re sending Trump back to the White House today. My impression is that this is at his insistence. I’ve read in a number of places that he thinks being in a hospital makes him look weak.

Since I’m not a doctor and I have no idea what the status of his health is, I can’t say whether sending him home is a good idea or not. Here it says patients with severe infections may not feel completely awful for the first four to seven days, and then they get slammed. Depending on when Trump’s symptoms began, he may not have hit the slammed stage yet. Or it may be that they’ve loaded him up with enough steroids and who knows what that he won’t be as slammed as a regular patient who isn’t getting super-duper care.

It’s also possible that they’ve set up an ICU in the White House and plan to give him the same treatment there he would have gotten in the hospital. It’s also possible the White House physician, Sean Conley, is an incompetent hack. I don’t know the man personally and cannot say.

And it’s also possible the crew at Walter Reed is exhausted with trying to deal with him and just want to get rid of him.

Gabriel Sherman has a fascinating bit at Vanity Fair:

Donald Trump’s erratic and reckless behavior in the last 24 hours has opened a rift in the Trump family over how to rein in the out-of-control president, according to two Republicans briefed on the family conversations. Sources said Donald Trump Jr. is deeply upset by his father’s decision to drive around Walter Reed National Military Medical Center last night with members of the Secret Service while he was infected with COVID-19. “Don Jr. thinks Trump is acting crazy,” one of the sources told me. The stunt outraged medical experts, including an attending physician at Walter Reed.

According to sources, Don Jr. has told friends that he tried lobbying Ivanka Trump, Eric Trump, and Jared Kushner to convince the president that he needs to stop acting unstable. “Don Jr. has said he wants to stage an intervention, but Jared and Ivanka keep telling Trump how great he’s doing,” a source said. Don Jr. is said to be reluctant to confront his father alone. “Don said, ‘I’m not going to be the only one to tell him he’s acting crazy,’” the source added.

One of the drugs he is taking, dexamethasone, is known to be dangerous and only given to the most severly infected patients. It is also known to have various mind- and mood-altering effects, and many have suggested that if the POTUS is on it somebody really ought to turn the keys to the car over to Mike Pence. However, given that it’s Trump we’re talking about, I don’t see that it matters. It’s not like he could do the job anyway. Just don’t let him nuke anybody.

More about Trump’s covid treatment:

Some experts raised an additional possibility: that the president is directing his own care, and demanding intense treatment despite risks he may not fully understand. The pattern even has a name: V.I.P. syndrome, which describes prominent figures who receive poor medical care because doctors are too zealous in treating them — or defer too readily to their instructions. …

… Using multiple drugs at once could have an impact on their effectiveness, and it increases the risk of harmful drug interactions, said Dr. McGinn.

“You’re giving remdesivir, you’re giving dexamethasone, and you’re giving monoclonal antibodies,” he said, referring to the experimental treatment by Regeneron. “No one’s ever done that, not to mention famotidine and some zinc and a mix of cocktails, or whatever else he’s on.”

Maybe he’ll grow feathers. That would be fun.

Marian Kamensky

Paul Waldman and Greg Sargent:

Because of Trump’s recklessness, we’re only just beginning to see how far the virus is spreading among Republicans. Press secretary Kayleigh McEnany just announced that she has tested positive, bringing the total number of senior Republican officials and lawmakers who have recently announced contracting the virus to over a dozen.

With Republicans tied to Trump’s utter contempt for social distancing and his cultlike command that all Republicans treat the virus as largely a nonissue, they have to hope it won’t spread much deeper into their own ranks.

I see now that Attorney General Bill Barr has decided to self-quarantine after all. I still expect him to announce he’s been infected some time this week. But Mike Pence, who also was sitting in the front row at the Amy Coney Barrett Nomination Announcement and Virus Spreading Event, is traveling around the country campaigning, I understand. Maybe he’ll get sick, too. Hello, President Pelosi.

See also:

Elaine Godfey and Adam Harris, The People Trump Is Coming Home To: The president’s behavior threatens the very employees charged with taking care of him.

Timothy Noah, Why Won’t the White House Let the CDC Contact Trace Its Rose Garden Event?

Trump’s medical team says Trump is doing just grand and that Trump might be discharged tomorrow. Whatever. The only thing I know for certain is that we don’t know anything for certain. The White House and Trump’s doctors can’t be trusted to tell us the truth. So we’ll see what happens.

But I want to talk about personal responsibility. Remember when Republicans called themselves the “party of personal responsibility”? They’re still doing it for all I know. What they meant by that is that ordinary people are supposed to take care of themselves without depending on government so that government can focus on taking care of rich people. But really, the whole concept of “personal responsibility doesn’t seem to be something they grasp.

Let’s review: In the age of covid-19, personal responsibility looks like this:

Figure One: A Biden Press Conference. July 2020. The Independent (UK) photo

Personal responsibility does not look like this:

Figure Two: Amy Coney Barrett nomination announcement and virus spreading event, the former White House rose garden, September 26, Voice of America photo

All the people at this event other than Trump who have tested positive this past week were in the first two rows. You may not be able to make him out, but Attorney General Bill Barr is in the first row. And Attorney General Bill Barr has decided he doesn’t need to quarantine himself. Where do they find these people? I hope somebody starts a betting pool on when Barr announces he’s positive. I’m taking Thursday, October 8, 11;36 pm.

At Vanity Fair, Gabriel Sherman writes that some Trumpers are having a hard time understanding the whole virus spread thing.

Inside Trumpworld, the shock of Trump’s hospitalization is giving way to despair about his prospects in the upcoming election. “They all know it’s over,” a Republican close to the campaign said. “This is spiraling out of control,” a former West Wing official said. Some Trump allies are entertaining conspiracy theories that the White House outbreak was caused by someone with political motives. “It’s weird that all these Republicans are getting it,” a prominent Republican told me. “I don’t know what the fuck is going on. But one thing I’ve learned is: when something major happens thirty days before an election, it usually has to do with the election.” (There is no evidence for this wild claim).

It’s not weird at all that a cluster of Republicans are getting the virus. Just see Figure One and Figure Two, above. That explains it all.

Also at Vanity Fair, see Charlotte Klein:

Despite being at least the third Republican senator to test positive for COVID-19 within the last 24 hours, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin still doesn’t think mask mandates are a good idea. On Saturday, hours after announcing he had contracted the coronavirus, the GOP lawmaker reportedly said that masks may help reduce the risk of infection but are “certainly not a cure-all” and should be an “individual responsibility.” Johnson’s comments come a day after Republicans who control the legislature moved to strike down Democratic Governor Tony Evers’ statewide mask mandate. Meanwhile, the swing state has seen a surge of COVID-19 cases in recent days, surpassing daily records for new cases and deaths and raising concerns over Wisconsin’s hospital capacity.

Many things should be an individual responsibility, Senator. But since too many people lack the sense God gave turnips, somebody has to set rules.

Charlotte Klein goes on to explain that while a senator may participate in hearings virtually, when the time comes for a floor vote on something — like, say, Amy Barrett’s nomination to the Supreme Court — senators have to be there in person. That means having a bunch of Republican senators out with the covid could interfere with Mitch McConnell’s quickie nomination process. Heh.

Going back to whatever shape Trump is in now — we really don’t know. He released a short video that at least shows us he’s not on a ventilator, and he has released a couple of photographs that make it appear he is doing presidential stuff, but the photos are being slammed as being staged. And I don’t much care if Mike Pence is standing by to resume command or not, because Trump never did the job of POTUS, anyway.

See also Little evidence that White House has offered contact tracing, guidance to hundreds potentially exposed.

Update: The toddler-in-chief briefly left the hospital so he could be driven around to wave at supporters. Seriously. If the driver gets covid, he should sue.

I confess I spent way too much time this morning trying to find out if Mitch McConnell was present at the Amy Coney Barrett Nomination Announcement and Virus Spreader Event. Alas, I could not confirm that he was. But he might have been. (Please, oh please …)

I need a running list of the high-level Republicans who have tested positive since the Trump announcement. The most recent victim is Sen. Ron Johnson. Oh, no, wait .. now it’s Chris Christie. So hard to keep up. Before that, after Trump and Melania, it was senators Mike Lee and Thom Tillis, Kellyanne Conway, campaign manager Bill Stepien, Hope Hicks, and RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel.  Am I leaving anyone out?

The only thing I’m hearing about McConnell is that he’s doubling down on getting Barrett confirmed ASAP, possibly before too many Republican senators become utterly incapacitated. Tillis and Lee are on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and I believe most if not all of the Republicans on that Committee were at the Rose Garden nomination/spreader event.

Lee was in the White House Rose Garden, without a mask, on Saturday for Trump’s official announcement that Barrett would be the nominee for the Supreme Court vacancy, and was seated near other Republican members of the Judiciary Committee: Mike Crapo of Idaho, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Ben Sasse of Nebraska, Josh Hawley of Missouri and Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee.

Note that it can take as many as fourteen days between exposure and a positive test result, according to a random medical page on the Web. This is why having had a recent negative test result is not an excuse for not wearing a mask. Someone might explain that to Mark Meadows.

See also Invincibility punctured by infection: How the coronavirus spread in Trump’s White House at WaPo:

The ceremony in the White House Rose Garden last Saturday was a triumphal flashback to the Before Times — before public health guidelines restricted mass gatherings, before people were urged to wear masks and socially distance….

… Spirits were high. Finally, Trump was steering the national discussion away from the coronavirus pandemic — which had already killed more than 200,000 people in the United States and was still raging — to more favorable terrain, a possible conservative realignment of the Supreme Court.

Attendees were so confident that the contagion would not invade their seemingly safe space at the White House that, according to Jenkins, after guests tested negative that day they were instructed they no longer needed to cover their faces. The no-mask mantra applied indoors as well. Cabinet members, senators, Barrett family members and others mixed unencumbered at tightly packed, indoor receptions in the White House’s Diplomatic Room and Cabinet Room.

You know, I honestly don’t believe all of these people are stupid. They are certainly capable of understanding the basics of how a virus spreads. Apparently they simply don’t want to understand the basics of how a virus spreads. I’ll come back to this in a bit.

Right now it’s looking like the people at most risk were on Trump’s debate prep team and/or at the Barrett nomination announcement. (Two members of the debate prep team who haven’t yet tested positive, as far as we know, are Jared Kushner and campaign adviser Jason Miller. Stay tuned.) And it’s possible some coronavirus got spread around at the debate, especially considering the Trump attendees refused to wear masks.

Those who have been retracing Trump’s steps over the past few days have noted with alarm that he’s been in maskless, not-socially-distanced contact with much of the upper echelon of the Republican Party. This includes Ronna McDaniel, the RNC chair, who  tested positive on Wednesday. See Sam Brody, Daily Beast:

The web of those exposed by President Donald Trump’s coronavirus diagnosis reads like a who’s who of his peripatetic campaign: his campaign manager, the chair of the Republican National Committee, the leader of the House GOP’s campaign arm, and several high-profile members of Congress.

Now, those officials—not to mention countless supporters of the president—have either contracted COVID-19 or are at high risk for it after a week in which an infected Trump has criss-crossed the country. It also means a wide swath of the GOP’s formal campaign apparatus could be sidelined a month before a pivotal election in which the party is losing ground in its efforts to hold onto the White House, keep the Senate, and recapture the House.

Go on to read the rest of the article to see where he’s been and who he has been in contact with.  For example, at least two other people at the Amy Coney Barrett nomination announcement on Saturday have tested positive — Republican Utah Sen. Mike Lee and the Rev. John Jenkins, the president of the University of Notre Dame. Trump was not exactly exercising caution at the event; Sam Brody writes that “video taken of the event by a CNN reporter shows him hugging and greeting other attendees without wearing a mask.” I don’t suppose there is any way to know if Trump was the infector or infectee at that point.

Amy Coney Barrett herself says she already had the virus and recovered.

There are some hints here and there that Trump was not feeling well as early as Wednesday. His speech at a rally in Minnesota was short, by Trump standards, for example. But sources in the White House are saying that Trump feels just fine or has only mild symptoms or has a fever and a cough. Given how the White House clearly lies about the state of Trump’s health, my guess is that he’s sicker than they’re letting on.

Erin Banco and Asawin Suebsaeng of the Daily Beast say that the White House has been plain sloppy about virus protocols for a long time.

News that President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump had contracted the coronavirus may have sent shockwaves through the nation’s capital as it awoke Friday morning. But for those who worked for the president, the surprise was that it had taken this long to get to this point.

The White House may house some of the most important figures in government. But for months, the testing protocols to screen potentially infectious individuals have been more lax than the president’s aides present to the public.

It’s a wonder he didn’t catch it sooner. Joe Biden is still negative, he says, although that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s in the clear.

Paul Waldman writes that Trump thought he could beat the virus with spin. Obviously, he failed.

Charles Pierce has questions, including “Do they have to disinfect the nuclear ‘football’?” and “Does the White House have enough roosts for all these returning chickens?”

The Probable Outcomes of Trump’s Diagnosis.

Update: CNN reports that Trump is on his way to Walter Reed.

If we were all living inside a novel, this is the exact moment a savvy author would give Trump the virus. The timing couldn’t be better. Here’s the latest:

The president is expected to conduct official and political events from the residence — including a call Friday with senior citizens about the coronavirus.

The diagnosis is a jolt for the country’s leadership and had some advisers early Friday discussing the continuity of government should the president’s condition grow worse. Vice President Pence tested negative for the virus Friday morning, a spokesman said.

The announcement of Trump’s infection was soon followed by a torrent of speculation that he is faking covid to get out of the next debate. I doubt that, because the next debate is a couple of weeks off yet. Also, too:

More sage posters, like author and self-described conspiracy-theory debunker Mike Rothschild offered this: “The galaxy brain take is that Trump is faking COVID to get out of the debates or distract from the tax stuff. But his image depends on being a bull god street fighter Adonis who outworks men half his age. He wouldn’t pretend to be sick and weak. If anything, he’d cover it up.”

Indeed, yesterday before the announcement Scott Lemieux of Lawyers, Guns and Money speculated that Trump already was infected and was covering it up. .

Philip Bump at WaPo also speculates that if the news of Hope Hicks’s infection hadn’t been leaked, would we have learned about Trump?

Bump reminds us of all the times the Trump and his people have issued obviously phony reports of his robust good health, so if Meadows says he’s experiencing “mild symptoms” he’s probably not doing well at all.

Now, let me say now that I don’t want him to die. I want him to lose. I want him indicted and convicted. I want him wrung out to dry by the legal system. Death at this point is too good for him.

I keep reading that there are fewer undecided voters now than at this same point in past presidential elections. Yet there are some.

It may be that there are some people calling themselves undecided who really, deep down, know who they want to vote for but just don’t want to say it out loud for some reason. And I appreciate that.

But some appear to be genuinely undecided. And these are the people who get rounded up by Frank Luntz and his ilk every four years and interviewed after debates. And I wish it would stop, because I honestly think some of these people remain undecided because they think it makes them special.

And every four years, these remarkable specimens say they are undecided because they don’t know how the candidates stand on issues, even after months of news coverage about how the candidates stand on issues. For example, NPR interviewed some undecideds after the debate from hell Tuesday night.

Zoey Shisler, of Tacoma, Wash., told NPR she was hoping to hear more about how the candidates would address the economy.

“All Biden had to do was convince me that he has policies that are gonna replace Trump when he gets in office, and he hasn’t convinced me of that,” she said.

Dear Undecided Voter:

Listen up. There’s this thing called the “internet.” If you can use it, go to the “issues” page on Joe Biden’s website. You have to get around a lot of obnoxious pop-ups asking for donations, but it’s do-able. Here is a link:

Joe Biden’s Stand on the Issues

This leads you to a page with more links to details on Joe Biden’s policy positions. You can … well, I can, anyway … read everything there in a lot less time than it took to sit through that damn debate.

On top of that, Biden has been running for president for several months. There have been interviews and articles in news media for months about his policy positions. The Democrats have a whole 91-page booklet called the “2020 Democratic Party Platform” available on the Web that spells out the policies Biden has agreed to support.

Granted, candidates don’t always stick to the platform after they are elected, but that’s true of everything else they say in the campaigns. This will at least give you an idea of the general direction he’ll probably wander off in.

Debates historically are piss-poor places to learn about candidates and their positions on issues. Even during a “normal” debate, the candidates are rarely allowed to say anything in detail and the moderators usually ask inane questions. The debates are mostly about watching to see if somebody says something stupid that will cost him votes, like when Gerald Ford inexplicably forgot that Poland was behind the Iron Curtain. That was classic. Seriously, the only information sources worse than debates are television ads and social media.

But if you sincerely want to know what candidates’ policy positions are, you have to be willing to make an effort to pay attention to the news and be willing to read stuff, like newspapers, because the teevee news rarely covers issues in depth. But at this point, given all the coverage, there is absolutely no excuse for having no idea whatsoever about Biden’s positions. I can appreciate that you might not know fine details, like Biden’s exact proposed numbers for marginal tax rates, off the top of your head. But you ought to know by now, for example, that Biden intends to repeal most if not all of Trump’s tax cuts for the wealthy that have created massive budget deficits.

You do know that Trump created massive budget deficits, right? It’s been in the news.

Further, Donald Trump has been the bleeping president for going on four years now, and he and his shenanigans have been in the bleeping news several times a day every day for all this time. And Joe Biden was a bleeping senator for thirty-something years, beginning in 1973, and then was the bleeping vice president of the United States for eight years, and he was in the news at least once a month, if not once a week, all that time.

Yes, Biden has changed his positions on some things over the years, and Trump appears to change many of his positions several times a day. But by now you at least should have a pretty good sense of who these guys are, whether they are bright or stupid, mostly honest or not, are psychologically normal or belong under a bell jar in the psychopath museum, etc.

And they are the choices. Who’s it going to be? And how can you possibly live in this country awash with media all screaming at you about the candidates and be so unaware of what’s been going on? Where do you keep your head? Somewhere behind that box of old toys in the basement?

Being undecided doesn’t make you smart or special. It makes you pathetic. And I wish the Frank Luntz’s would stop interviewing undecided voters. Interviews and focus groups of undecided voters are interesting in a freak-show sort of way — as in wow, look at that two-headed snake! or wow, how can these people be so clueless! — but they are a waste of my time, frankly, and most voters’ time.

So get over yourselves, pay attention, make an effort, and either come to a decision or not. It’s up to you.

Newsweek https://www.newsweek.com/2020/09/04/undecided-voters-were-key-trumps-win-2016-will-they-deliver-again-1526824.html

Right now I imagine the debate commission is having a serious Zoom meeting to discuss what to do about the other two debates. Right now a lot of Serious People are callling for the remaining two debates to be canceled rather than submit the nation to another embarassing display of whatever-that-was. See:

• David Graham, The Atlantic, Cancel the Debates
• Judy Berman, Time, America Has Suffered Enough
• David Mastio and Jill Lawrence, USA Today, Please Make It Stop

OK, this just in:

Some other people are calling for Biden to boycott the other two debates, although I don’t personally agree with that. If anyone quits, it ought to be Trump. But perhaps the worthless DNC is on the phone to the debate commission now to see if anything can be done to make the other two debates less ridiculous. At the very least, Trump should get his mic cut if he goes off like a lunatic again.

The second presidential debate is scheduled for October 15. “Steve Scully, who is the political editor at C-SPAN, will moderate a town-hall-style event with undecided voters from South Florida,” it says here. With the caveat that still-undecided voters must be idiots, that format ought to restrain Trump a bit. Ought to, I said. It might not.

And the vice-presidential debate will be October 7. I do intend to watch that one.

It will be four or five days before we know if that travesty changed anyone’s mind. The “overnight” polls favored Biden. But some people polled thought Trump was great. I am tempted to suggest those people need to be monitored.

There were a couple of moments that might be significant. Here is one:

WALLACE:

One final question for you, Mr. Vice President, if Senate Republicans — we were originally talking about the Supreme Court here — if Senate Republicans, go ahead and confirm justice Barrett, there has been talk about ending the filibuster, or even packing the court, adding to the nine justices there. You call this a distraction by the president, but in fact it wasn’t brought up by the President, it was brought up by some of your Democratic colleagues in Congress. So my question to you as you have refused in the past to talk about it: Are you willing to tell the American people tonight, whether or not you will support either ending the filibuster or packing the court.

6:16 BIDEN

Whatever position I take on that, that’ll become the issue — the issue is, the American people should speak. You should go out and vote. We’re in voting now, vote and let your senators know how strongly you feel. Vote now, in fact let people know it is your senators. I’m not going to answer the question.

TRUMP

Why won’t you answer the question — radical left — well, listen.

BIDEN

Would you shut up, man.

TRUMP

Who is on your list?

16:49 WALLACE

We have ended this segment. We’re going to move on to the second segment.

Not answering the question suggests he’s leaving open the issues of the filibuster and adding justices. So that’s encouraging.

And then there was this:

1:04:23 WALLACE

Okay, you have repeatedly criticized the Vice President for not specifically calling out antifa and other left-wing groups. But are you willing, tonight, to condemn white supremacists and militia groups? And to say that they need to stand down and not add to the violence in a number of these cities, as we saw in Kenosha, as we’ve seen in Portland? Are you prepared specifically to do that?

1:04:46 TRUMP

Sure, I’m prepared to do it. I would say- I would say, almost everything I see is from the left-wing, not from the right wing-

1:05:55 WALLACE

So what do you, what do you say-

1:04:56 TRUMP

I’m willing to do anything I want to see peace.

1:04:57 WALLACE

Then do it, sir.

1:04:59 BIDEN

Say it, do it, say it.

1:05:00 TRUMP

You want to call them — What do you want to call them? Give me a name, give me —

1:05:04 WALLACE

White supremacists and, white supremacists and right-wing —

1:05:07 BIDEN

The Proud Boys.

1:05:07 TRUMP

Proud Boys, stand back and stand by. But I’ll tell you what, I’ll tell you what, somebody’s got to do something about antifa and the left because this is not a right-wing problem. This is a left-wing problem

1:05:19 BIDEN

His own FBI director said — white supremacists. Antifa is an idea not an organization. Militia —

1:05:27 TRUMP

Oh you’ve got to be kidding me

1:05:27 BIDEN

His FBI said —

1:05:28 TRUMP

Well then, you know what —

1:05:29 WALLACE

Gentlemen, we’re done, sir. We’re going to go on to the next-

What FBI Director Wray said a few days ago was that antifa is more of an ideology than an organization, but whatever. Trump’s “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by,” is being touted as a signal to the Proud Boys to be ready to attack. “One prominent Proud Boys supporter on Parler said Trump appeared to give permission for attacks on protesters, adding that ‘this makes me so happy,'” it says here. See also DHS draft document: White supremacists are greatest terror threat.

Trump’s part of the debate was pretty much a lie-fest from beginning to end. Biden misstated a couple of things. See the Associated Press Fact Check.

And then there was Trump’s attack on representative democracy. See David Sanger, Tuesday’s Debate Made Clear the Gravest Threat to the Election: The President Himself.

He began the debate with a declaration that balloting already underway was “a fraud and a shame” and proof of “a rigged election.”

It quickly became apparent that the president was doing more than simply trying to discredit the mail-in ballots that are being used to ensure voters are not disenfranchised by a pandemic — the same way of voting that five states have used with minimal fraud, for years.

He followed it by encouraging his supporters to “go into the polls” and “watch very carefully,” which seemed to be code words for a campaign of voter intimidation, aimed at those who brave the coronavirus risks of voting in person.

And his declaration that the Supreme Court would have to “look at the ballots” and that “we might not know for months, because these ballots are going to be all over” seemed to suggest that he will try to place the election in the hands of a court where he has been rushing to cement a conservative majority with his nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett.

And if he cannot win there, he has already raised the possibility of using the argument of a fraudulent election to throw the decision to the House of Representatives, where he believes he has an edge, since every state delegation gets one vote in resolving an election with no clear winner. At least for now, 26 of those delegations have a majority of Republican representatives.

Sanger also says that Tuesday’s debate may have been a signal to Russian to crank up the hacking.

Ryan Lizza at Politico has a pretty good analysis of why Trump behaved as he did: Bullying is all he’s got. He’s got no second term agenda, he has a terrible record to defend, and Joe Biden is harder to demonize than was Hillary Clinton.

We should remember also that bullying and abusive behavior are basically strategies of pro-active victimization. Bullies and abusers are compelled to dominate and terrorize because they think that’s what will happen to them if they don’t. Jonathan Allen, NBC News.:

In the end, what voters saw was a president who was deeply fearful of the result of a fair election determined on the actual positions and records of the two candidates. And yet, his desire to dominate the debate stage — to talk over both his opponent and the moderator, Chris Wallace — made it more likely that the race will be a referendum on him than a choice between him and Biden.

Charles Pierce:

If I am discovered in a state of advanced catatonia at any point in the next few days, please let it be placed on the permanent record that it was, “They’ll take out all the cows!” that did it. I hung in there as long as a human being could, but then, in the middle of another manic episode during his debate with Joe Biden, El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago started raving about the Green New Deal and the end of airplanes. He was overcome by the vision of AOC and Bernie Sanders out there on the Great Plains, cow-tipping. At this point, my higher faculties said, “Fck this noise. We’re out of here,” and got out of the business.

On a more sober note:

He wants his own private Belarus, with his own private militias at polling places, and in the streets if he loses, and he’s fixing things to get it, too.

That’s the only story from Tuesday night: the great, looming, consistent threat emerging from whatever the hell that event became. It was coming from the manic bully who is presently the President* of the United States. It was pure fascism, right down to the set of his chin that he stole from Mussolini, but it was fascism at the behest of a career failure who was sending out a call for anyone else with a sense of failure and a long gun.

 

More Debate Commentary, in No Particular Order

Josh Marshall, The Morning After

James Fallows, A Disgusting Night for Democracy

Dahlia Lithwick, The Most Important Thing Biden Did During Tuesday’s Debate (if you run into a subscription wall, use an incognito or private window)

David Weigel, The Trailer: What happened in Cleveland

There’s a lot more, but damn.

Andy Marlette