by Conrad Black
The fraudulent Biden campaign effectively blew up on Thursday night in Nashville.
After five days of intensive subterranean preparation, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden was coherent and gaffe-free for the first hour and got to the end without any horrifying blunders, though he trailed off into grammatical chaos and jumbled articulation a couple of times. There were relatively few interruptions and no persistent interruptions and neither candidate was acoustically or behaviorally irritating.
The moderator, Kristen Welker, was fair and efficient. President Trump skillfully cast himself as an “outsider” who gets and has produced results, facing an insider who has accomplished precious little useful after 47 years paddling and wallowing in the public trough and moving steadily to the left.
Trump finally gave a spirited and plausible defense of his COVID leadership and gave voice to the national impatience with a policy of panic and defeatism. He exhorted the audience: “Learn to live with it,” and the former vice president, in what presumably he thought was a clever rejoinder, said that “We will have to learn to die with it.” Trump, in turn, referred effectively, but unhistrionically, to his own bout with the coronavirus.
Trump’s dismissal of his opponent as “a politician, you’re all talk and no action” was a direct hit, especially when followed by demands to know what had been preventing Biden in his previous 47 years in Washington from doing what he now promises to achieve.
Trump debunked most of the traditional Democratic smears against him. He pointed at the fraudulence of most of the claims of illegally entering families from Latin America being separated from their children when most of the children are just props used to facilitate their entry, and when separated the pretended parents vanish into America and are never seen again.
Biden declined to acknowledge that it was the Obama Administration that built the “cages” on the southern border, and Trump finally hung the vice president and his family’s dealings with Ukraine, Russia, and China around his opponent’s neck like a toilet seat.
About the “Laptop From Hell”
Biden was pushed into claiming that the laptop of his son retrieved from a computer repair shop in Wilmington, Delaware was a plant created by the Russians.
Although it appears that the Bidens collected approximately $10 million from Russia, China, and Ukraine while Joe Biden was vice president, the Democratic nominee solemnly declared that there was “nothing unethical” in his son’s conduct.
Biden clung to the moth-eaten fraud that the allegations against his son were Russian disinformation (despite U.S. intelligence community denials), and the latest Democratic counter-charge about Trump having a Chinese bank account was dismissed by the president with statements that he had opened one for corporate purposes but closed it two years before he became president. He further noted that the $750 referred to as his taxes in one year were a filing fee and that he had in fact pre-paid tens of millions of dollars in taxes. He reminded viewers that the IRS and the Mueller investigation had gone meticulously through all of his records and tax returns and had not found or alleged one misdirected cent.
At different times in the course of the 90-minute debate, Biden denied that his medical plan consisted of “socialized medicine,” though in fact that is what his “public option” would be. He claimed that no one lost their medical plans or doctor relationships under Obamacare, when it is a notorious and indisputable fact that millions of people did. He denied that in the debate over the Crime Bill in 1994 he had ever referred to African Americans as “super predators,” and he denied that he had ever advocated the banning of fracking. There are countless videos of his calling for a ban on fracking and of his disparaging references to the “super predators.”
What the Frack?
At one point in the exchange, at Biden’s invitation, Trump promised to post video evidence of Biden promising to ban fracking. And Trump promptly did. More importantly, though, Biden pledged zero carbon emissions in the United States by 2035, which means the total elimination of the oil and gas industries in all forms by then. This statement in itself should have won Trump the election; it almost certainly delivers Pennsylvania to him.
Biden foolishly returned to the charge of Trump being a “racist,” for which his only authority was the allegation that he had attempted to ban all Muslims from the country (Muslims are not a race and the charge is not true—he was banning anyone from terrorist-infested countries, most of which, it turns out, were majority Muslim countries), and the old canard that Trump had once dismissed all Mexicans who would come to the United States illegally as “rapists” and murderers. He had no reply to Trump’s statement that there could not be anyone in that room less racist than himself. (Biden only uttered the ghastly fiction “systemic racism” once.)
Biden had no reply when Trump pointed out that he had been firmer in dealing with Russia than had the Obama Administration or any president since Reagan, and the accusation of being too friendly with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un was easily rebutted by Trump’s remarks that the provocations from North Korea had ceased and that there was nothing in itself wrong with having civil relations with a politically distasteful foreign leader.
Biden dismissed this as nonsense and then went on to claim that we had “good relations with Hitler before the war.” (In fact relations with Hitler were frosty virtually from the moment he came into office a few weeks before Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933. Roosevelt withdrew the American ambassador after the infamous ”Kristallnacht” pogroms in November 1938 and neither country had an ambassador in the other’s capital again until the founding of the Federal Republic in 1949.)
At different times Biden said that he would “transition out of fracking” and “capture the emissions of fracking,” but none of it hit the right notes or sounded sincere, and instead constituted an unmistakable declaration of war against the entire oil industry. Biden’s attempt to justify his enthusiasm for the Paris Climate Accord was the usual feeble invocation of the “existential threat to humanity of global warming—the world will be at the point of no return in 10 years”; the supposedly unanimous scientists spouting that nonsense have passed through many points of no return in the last 40 years.
Goebbelsesque Misinformation
The entire Biden campaign, conducted by the media, not by the spavined candidate, has been Trump-hate and false allegations of COVID incompetence. On this night, there were no grounds for which to hate Trump, and his defense of his record in dealing with the pandemic was quite plausible. Trump did much better in his representation of his opponent as a shabby politician, a tool of both Wall Street and the extremists in his party, a “corrupt failure,” and someone in no position to be lecturing America about “morality and integrity.”
Biden has been caught red-handed monetizing the vice presidency and has been exposed as having no serious argument to make against the reelection of this president. Unless the rabidly dishonest partisan media manage an unheard-of paroxysm of Goebbelsesque misinformation, this debate should have been a turning point.
A snap Chicago Tribune-WGN poll showed 74 percent of people canvassed thought Trump won the debate; Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C) declared that Trump had won the election. Like a fly blasted with insecticide, Biden and his campaign will buzz around for a few days in insouciant denial, but their levitation should finally be over.
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Conrad Black has been one of Canada’s most prominent financiers for 40 years, and was one of the leading newspaper publishers in the world as owner of the British telegraph newspapers, the Fairfax newspapers in Australia, the Jerusalem Post, Chicago Sun-Times and scores of smaller newspapers in the U.S., and most of the daily newspapers in Canada.
Photo “Joe Biden” by Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0.
