NB: One criminal and sleazy con-man; the other with the blood of over 140,000 Palestinians murdered or wounded by American-supplied Israeli munitions on his hands. One liable for life imprisonment for instigating violent insurrection; the other fit for trial as enabler of genocide; and thereafter for confinement in an old age home for mass murderers. These are the choices the world’s ‘indispensable nation’ (according to Madeleine Albright) has brought forth for itself. Small mercy that God’s name is printed on all their dollar bills.
Here’s (what appears to be) a forthright report on how these two lunatics speak in public. DS
“We Bought the Certain Dog” The first debate
MARK KROTOV
A Trump–Chernenko debate would have been less punishing and more rewarding than what went down in Atlanta. As Biden death-marched to the podium he seemed to be communicating his greetings to the moderators via grunt. The speaking voice that then emerged seemed like little more than an elaboration on the grunt, an uncanny, cold-induced dirge. The debate’s longest and most punishing twenty-second stretch—Biden freezing, starting and restarting, and finally recovering only via pure nonsense (“We finally beat Medicare”)— furnished the night with its most indelible moment. But a comparatively modest slip just before that felt more revealing, when Biden corrected “a thousand trillionaires in America” to “billionaires in America” and, in the next sentence, “$500 million dollars” to “billion dollars.” Once, sure, Brezhnev might have done that. But two in a row?
It was even worse when Biden wasn’t talking. For half of the debate, as Trump ranted away, there was Biden’s resting lost face on the right side of the split screen, a sad, vacant look that suggested a profound and existential confusion. I knew that Biden hadn’t actually shut down, that he heard what Trump was saying and made some effort to respond to it. But none of that could compensate for the anguished intensity of the resting lost face, an intensity familiar to me from the last few years of my dad’s life. In that case, too, I came to realize that even as my dad’s face occasionally suggested complete withdrawal from the world, he could in fact be present and responsive. But it’s the face that I remember, not the lucid-adjacent words that would inevitably follow….
https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/we-bought-the-certain-dog/
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Michael Brenner: Lowering the Throne of America’s Delusion
What links Rishi Sunak, Javier Milei and Donald Trump? The shadowy network behind their policies
Alex Ross: How American Racism Influenced Hitler / The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law
‘Christian nationalism’ in American politics: the Republican hotline to Jesus
The American Christian Right’s Flirtation with Political Violence and Far-Right Extremism
Facing three global crises, the American empire may be nearing final collapse
Is America like the Soviet Union in 1990?
Alfred McCoy: The crumbling delusion of Washington’s endless world dominion
After the truth-shower 