Tag Archives: Chris Wallace

You Gotta Let It Hang Out, Joe. At This Point Perception is Far Worse Than Reality.

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Joe Biden Is Old. Get Over It.

After the Special Counsel report gratuitously describing him as “an elderly man with a poor memory” the clear consensus is that Joe Biden has to come out of his protective shell, say “f*ck it”, (as he is wont to say) and let it all hang out. Just as with “crooked Hillary” and “her e-mails” back in 2016 the meme has settled in that he, Joe Biden, an honest operator with 50 years of government experience is a bigger risk than a 77 year-old failed casino operator campaigning as the fool he is proud to be.

Sunday’s Super Bowl may have been the single most-watched telecast … in history … and Biden passed on an interview with CBS. Not with a self-serving gasbag like Bill O’Reilly or a smirking frat boy like Jesse Watters or some other right-wing stooge, but with an intellectually honest network’s interviewer. Someone with a professional allegiance to facts and respectful decorum. That was a big mistake.

Especially … especially … when you factor in that the game’s enormous audience was likely fueled by an unprecedented inflow of women primarily interested in the whole Taylor Swift side show. With women voters showing a 22% preference for Biden over a guy a lot of them likely regard as the epitome of a shit boyfriend/worse husband; an undisciplined, vulgar blowhard facing 91 criminal counts and officially judged a “rapist” for his assault on a woman in a department store dressing room, Biden failing to immediately recall the name of the president of Egypt could hardly be deemed perilous to their view of who is the wiser choice.

Both of these guys, Biden and Trump, are what they are. Both are old. One has five decades of experience with national and international crises. He understands climate and infrastructure policy. The other played a real estate mogul on a TV show, bankrupted a casino, lost more money than any other person in the United States over nine years, has never said a cross word about the Joseph Stalin of our era and has been regularly described as, “a fucking moron” by people he hired to work in his first administration.

So given the fact that barring some deus ex machina event that removes him from the nomination, Biden (i.e. his team of strategists) has to push him out for unscripted interviews. Not with MAGA fools like Watters, etc. But with people like, say, Jonathan Swan, now with The New York Times. Or Maggie Haberman of the Times. Chris Wallace at CNN. Jonathan Lemire of Politico. Hell, I see value in an hour-long chat with a bona fide conservative like Bill Kristol.

Let the public decide if his (lifelong) stutter or his occasionally lengthy reaches for a specific name or date is disqualifying early onset dementia or just an older guy whose head is full of names and dates. (Among the facts conveniently ignored amid the frenzy over Biden’s “gaffes” are all the times George W. Bush, 30 years younger, mangled names, dates and spewed out bizarre salads of incongruence.)

Neither of these guys is Bill Clinton or Barack Obama when it comes to slickness on the impromptu stage. But one is sane, sincere and qualified. The other is … well, we all know … . I don’t have to repeat myself.

“Stand by … This isn’t going to end well.”

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Well, among all the other things that have withered and died under Trump’s touch we can now add presidential debates. Team Biden will understand that they can’t refuse two more cage matches with Trump. They can’t “quit.” But the real question is who will want to watch? Last night settled any question still left hanging in the air that we’re dealing with something truly foul and reckless.

To quote Obama’s chief strategist, David Axelrod, no one, especially women, wants to spend more time with, “a big fat asshole”.

Before the debate’s first “segment” was half through the verdict was pretty well in, “This is a disaster.” By dawn today some of the early quotes are already legendary.

Jake Tapper at CNN: “That was a hot mess inside a dumpster fire inside a train wreck. That was the worst debate I have ever seen, in fact it wasn’t even a debate. It was a disgrace.”

His colleague Dana Bash (a nice blonde lady): “”I’m going to say it like it is. That was a shit show. We’re on cable. We can say it. Apologies for being crude. But that is really the phrase I’m getting from people on both sides of the aisle on text and the only phrase I can think of to describe it.”

Frank Bruni in the New York Times: “I’m not exaggerating when I say that Trump was breathtaking, and I may even be paying him something of a compliment, because it takes a peerless combination of audacity and mendacity to pull off some of what he pulled off.”

And on and on. Trump’s behavior was so ugly and boorish, so untethered from any kind of reality and dignity I couldn’t help but imagine mothers and fathers with impressionable children who had gathered to view an important historical event shuttling the kids off to an early bedtime to protect them from the snarls and hissing of America’s Elected Role Model-in-Chief.

It was so ugly it was obscene.

The ball is now in the court of the Commission on Presidential Debates. Since both campaigns have to agree to rule changes I don’t see how they get Team Trump to agree to a “kill switch” for microphones. Trump interrupted Biden something like 78 times. The switch would only be coming for him.

The Commission is also savvy enough to understand that Trump’s feral desperation is only going to get worse. He’s losing in national polling. He’s losing in battleground state polling. He’s getting obliterated in fund-raising. He doesn’t have enough cash on hand to be a TV presence in places like Minnesota, where he’s blustered he’s going to tip us red. (So … he has to fly in today and give another super spreader rally in an airplane hanger.)

The consensus is overwhelming that his brawling, drunk uncle routine last night is only going to make all those key metrics worse. (Biden pulled in an unprecedented $4 million in the first hour after the debate.) It’s a scenario that bodes for more of the same and worse for mild-mannered Steve Scully, of C-SPAN, moderator of the next debate.

If Chris Wallace couldn’t exert any control over Trump, Scully should bomb-proof the underside of his desk.

The negotiated agreement that the moderator would not provide fact-checking won’t be revisited. And it would do no good if it were. It would simply become a one-on-two debate with Trump raging against both the moderator and Biden.

As for Joe, I have to say he benefited from Trump’s belligerence. Biden had a half dozen golden opportunities handed to him to deliver a “Reaganesque” one-liner. When Trump muttered, “To be honest … ,’ Biden’s play was to wait a beat and reply, “Well, this’ll be a first for you. We’re all ears.”

Likewise, if at any point in one of Trump’s rabid rants Biden had just straightened up, looked at him in the eye and said, “Good god man! Get a grip! If you keep ranting like this you’ll have a stroke!” 61% of the viewing audience would have nodded and said, “No shit.”

Old School polite and diplomatic Joe Biden is/was no match for the New School Fox-and-Twitter bred histrionics and fact-free torrents of Trump. But Trump so wildly and crudely overplayed that hand no sane adult faulted Biden for failing to be glib and theatrical.

The reaction line Biden needed most was at the end, when Trump — the President of the United States — was asked to directly and unambiguously tell his most radical white supremacist supporters to stay calm and respect the outcome of the election, and his response was to tell the armed-to-the-teeth neo-Nazi Proud Boys to, “stand back and stand by.”

I mean, I bolted upright in my chair and shrieked, ” ‘Stand by!!!!’? What the [bleep] are you talking about you, appalling thug?”

Maybe the key issue facing the Commission is whether another debate as ugly and potentially inciteful as last night serves to enable Trump to spray more gasoline on possible insurrection.

I mean, Trump, who is incapable of hiding his darkest impulses did say/promise, “This isn’t going to end well.”

The Commission may need to believe what he says.

When Tara Met Joe.

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While, once again, we have a situation where only two people know for certain what if anything happened, we are all being forced to make a call. Assault or BS?

At this moment in the matter of “Is Joe Biden Just as Much of a Predator as Brett Kavanaugh and Donald Trump?” the ball is back in accuser Tara Reade’s court. Biden submitted to acceptably tough questioning from (long-time social friend) Mika Brezinski last week and flat out denied he did what Reade is now telling people he did. With that, the contemporary standards for public adjudication now requires Ms. Reade to present herself to some credible news outlet for similar interrogation.

Personally, I’d be happier with Biden if he chose someone like ABCs Martha Raddatz rather than an old friend on a liberal-leaning cable channel. If only because he’d be on higher ground if Reade opts for FoxNews, even if it’s with Chris Wallace and not one of their prime time chuckleheads. But whichever route Reade chooses … she has to step up to the mic.

To date, contrary to the predictable raging of the right-wing echo chamber, the “lamestream media” has now given Reade’s charges substantial and serious investigation. The problem for Reade though is that none have yet been able to come up with anything offering unequivocal proof she’s telling the truth. The best they’ve got to support her story of a 27 year-old incident is the call-in to Larry King’s CNN show in 1993 by a woman who sounds like, and may well have been Reade’s deceased mother. That, and an on-record statement from a Democrat-voting friend who recalls Reade telling her the assault happened. In other words … they heard Reade tell them a story.

But other than that, Reade’s own story has wobbled seriously, as has her brother’s. And that’s before we get to the part where not only doesn’t she have any paperwork from the complaint she says she filed, but has now shifted to saying she “chickened out”, and never actually followed through with an assault complaint.

Knowing how these things go campaign-wise, even if Reade never submits to a conditions-free interview, Republicans will howl and rant about a “liberal cover-up” and “hypocritical double-standard”, at least in relation to Kavanaugh. (With 24 women on-record accusing Trump of everything up to and including rape, he bears no comparison, and his devout, evangelical white base will continue to embrace him as God’s servant on Earth.)

The Kavanaugh “hypocrisy” of course falls apart if you were among those who actually paid attention to that drama. Dr. Christine Blasey-Ford, not only was/is a credible professional with a career to protect, she never made bizarre social media references about the “sensuous image” of Vladimir Putin. What she did do was suck it up, put her face, reputation and family safety on the line in front of an enormous TV audience and submit to cross-interrogation.

More importantly, where Biden is at least saying he will cooperate with a Senate investigation, the investigations into Ford’s accusations and charges of entitled frat-boy behavior on Kavanaugh’s part were strangled at birth. They were thwarted and neutered in the Republican-controlled Senate’s rush to confirm him — to a lifetime seat on the highest court of the land.

The righteous cry to “Believe the women!” has always been fatuous. No sane person goes around uncritically “believing” anything anyone says. The appropriate cry is, “Listen to the women!” That implies granting an accuser a respectful, non-threatening forum to tell the story they believe is important enough that all should hear.

With that in mind, the stage is all yours, Ms. Reade.