Debacle. Disaster. Embarrassing. Painful. Chaotic. Nasty. Train wreck. Disrespectful. Shit show. Abnormal. Sad. Torturous. How else can I describe last night’s “debate” between incumbent President Donald Trump and challenger, former Vice President Joe Biden?
Coming out in what became a sustained fury, Donald Trump simply would not stop talking — interrupting, badgering, heckling, taunting, and sniping at both debate moderator Chris Wallace and his Democratic rival, Joe Biden. Trump spent almost the entire debate lying about both his and Biden’s positions and then wrapped it up by refusing to condemn white supremacists and by attacking Biden’s family. He called Biden an idiot, smeared his family, and concocted wild conspiracy theories about everything from the Obama administration to the upcoming election.
At one point early on in the debate, after continuous interruptions by Trump, an exasperated Biden said, “Will you shut up, man.” Biden later called Trump a clown and implored him to stop yapping.
There are supposed to be two more presidential debates between now and Election Day. But I think it’s time to deliver a eulogy to dignity and decency in the form of a presidential debate process that belies what America is supposed is supposed to be about. I would recommend that Biden sit out the two remaining debates and let Trump continue to demonstrate just how unfit he is to be President.
Written for these daily prompts: Word of the Day Challenge (sustain), Ragtag Daily Prompt (fury), Fandango’s One-Word Challenge (eulogy), and Your Daily Word Prompt (belie)
This, That, and the Other 
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I agree with everything except Biden sitting out. However he needs some speech coaching on diction etc. I was so sorry seeing him defend his son when Trump’s complete assh–family sat there smirking. Ewww🤬
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Do you think debates are a useful format? All that happened last night was that Trump made a fool of himself. We didn’t learn anything new.
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Yes. He showed bo.self to be wat he is a bully blowhard
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And me to push send too quickly
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😂
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I think that the only way to handle Trump is to blurt out stuff once he starts going. Biden should try to stop defending his son and say outrageous things like, “So how was that golden shower that you took with Putin?”
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Ha!
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They should just not have debates. They’re just dumb wrestling matches since most people already know who they’re voting for at this point. Just sit the candidate in a room, have them talk for 1 hour about whatever they want and have an objective 3rd party challenge any claims they make.
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I agree – more of a town hall format. We would get a better idea of how the candidate would be in office than a debate. The debate format is not appropriate to judge candidates for president or any other high office. It’s more important to see how each candidate relates to others in a thoughtful way.
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Really good points. It actually makes me wonder how and why the debate format became the norm in the first place.
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That would make more sense.
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That would definitely be better than what I watched last night.
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Ya watch toooooo much TV. That debate reflect the pole animosity between the Never Trump DemoRATS, coupled with the Neo-Con GOP losers against the Trump GOP.
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I want to let you know that your comments, not just to me, but to those other bloggers who commented on my post are rude and inappropriate and have been deleted.
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But do you think it changed anybody’s opinion?
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How could it? I could hardly hear what either of the candidates was saying half the time because Trump kept interrupting and talking over both Biden and the moderator.
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I can’t imagine it would make a great deal of difference – I suspect there are very few undecided people at this moment.
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Maybe some independents might have been turned off by Trump’s behavior, but probably not too many actually changed how they’re gonna vote.
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Yeah, it’s all a farce. The RNC sent out stupid notices that Trump “won” before it began. Sure, he won Most Like A Kindergartner Flinging Poop At Everyone. Congrats, fuckhead 🤮
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🤦🏼♂️
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I didn’t watch because I foresaw the outcome. With no fact checking and no plan in place to enforce the rules it was bound to be what it was. I think that people need to let the networks know that they do not plan to watch the debates if they do not provide for the moderator to turn off the microphone of the person who isn’t supposed to be speaking and have fact checking real time. If the president doesn’t want to debate under those rules then leave watching to the professionals and review things when fact checks are available. Hit them in the ratings.
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The debate format encourages the participants to be contentious, because all they have time for is little snippets of information on policy. So usually what happens is each candidate ends up sniping at each other in order to gain supremacy in the debate. A town hall format allows each individual candidate to really lay out their plan or policy in a thoughtful way, and also there is some give and take between that candidate and the public.
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✔
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An excellent idea.
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Yes, it was all that. A shameful spectacle not fitting for a presidential debate.
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Yep, it was a shit show 😕
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The next debate will be a town hall, which will give Joe an opportunity to show his strengths—and will show trump at his worst.
I’d rather there were no more debates, but I don’t think the burden should fall on Biden. The commission should have the good sense to call it quits.
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I agree with that.
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Not even to mention, the childish, pouty faces that trump kept pulling. 😡 He doesn’t have a presidential cell in his body. He’s just an immature, lying, incompetent, cowardly bully who can only appeal to the basest of people.
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Unfortunately, those “basest of people” seem to make up more than 45% of the voters.
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😳😡
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Yep, and why a) if Biden sat out of the next debate it wouldn’t even matter really, because Trump’s base will still vote for him. Do we assume that they even like his behaviour? It gels with them?
And b) if Biden sat out of the next debate, it could just encourage that Trump base to feel even stronger, and encourage any wavering voters to (perhaps) lean into Trump?
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Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
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https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/01/trump-campaign-debate-commission-424633
Commission on Presidential Debates
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Trump says that if they change the rules, he won’t participate. But I just heard that he and Melania tested positive for COVID-19, so he may not be going anywhere for a while.
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May the Trump family quickly recover from this plague.
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Oh, you mean the plague that will disappear, like magic? Or will go away when the weather gets hot? Or that is little more than the flu?
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I mean the black swan that has all countries across the planet caught with their pants down.
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None so much as Trump’s America.
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Noise.
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The post WW1 flu killed more people than did the war in about the span of a year.
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Yes, but that was a century ago.
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A black swan plague devastated the American people. That it occurred post WW1 … so what?
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A black swan is any unpredictable event that is beyond what is normally expected of a situation and has potentially severe consequences. So what “black swan plague” are you talking about?
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I’m pretty sure it was going on during the war, too, and spread by it. Yep.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2862337/
And history dot com said it infected about a third of the world population of the time, killing up to an estimated 50 million (or as low as 20 million estimated) of the 500 million infected.
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https://www.passporthealthusa.com/2020/04/1918-spanish-flu-links-to-world-war-i/
The war generally [led] to increased press censorship to stop enemy nations from learning potentially important strategic information. However, this censorship wasn’t the case in Spain. As a non-combatant, Spain’s media openly reported on the spread of what came to be known as the Spanish flu. Ironically, the virus did not originate in the Iberian nation, but it was often claimed to have due to Spain being the only place reporting on the disease.
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https://academic.oup.com/shm/article/33/2/604/5262288
Medical historians have generally limited their analysis to the fact that the close quarters of soldiers and mass movement of troops during the First World War hastened the spread of the pandemic worldwide and possibly also augmented the mutation of the viral strain, which likely increased its lethality.9 Military historians have noted that the First World War was the first major military conflict during which more soldiers died of battlefield injuries rather than disease.10 Yet in the wake of the First World War the world faced a pandemic with mortality rates on an unprecedented scale—an experience that dramatically impacted armies around the world as the war was coming to its end, especially those fighting in tropical regions.11 In spite of this, military historians Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson have dismissed the influenza pandemic as a ‘quite irrelevant consideration’ when evaluating military causalities as a metric to assess military effectiveness at the end of the First World War.
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https://www.marketwatch.com/story/biden-campaign-pulls-down-attack-ads-as-trump-departs-white-house-for-hospital-01601676881?mod=mw_more_headlines
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“The Trump re-election campaign said several hours later that it would not reciprocate and pause advertisements attacking Biden.” Of course they wouldn’t. They’re despicable.
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Of course, it’s more like if they say they will enforce the rules that he and his team already agreed to (which rules or laws of the situation he didn’t respect at all) then he doesn’t want to play (no order and adherence for him). I’m wondering if he didn’t understand something like lights or a clock meant for him to know how much time he had. Or was he supposed to simply cooperate with the moderator? I know there have been separate visual cues in the past. Whatever… he and his team had agreed to it, and he didn’t follow through.
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All of those words and phrases accurately described the first debate. I stuck it out for the whole debate, I’m not sure why as all I heard was everyone yelling to be heard and no one doing anything close to a debate. I hope the next one will be better, but they better have a switch on Don’s mic so they can shut it off when his time is up.
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