39% of our divided nation probably greatly enjoyed the over-the-top scenery chomping performance by the Churl-in-Chief yesterday evening in the first presidential debate. Look up churlish in the dictionary, by the way, they have a picture of Mr. Trump [1]. Many, not among Mr. Trump’s undyingly loyal following, expressed horror at the “shit show”, “train wreck”, “dumpster fire”.

White supremacists, however, heard America’s president loud and clear– stop the mongrel bastards from voting. Whatever else you might say about the man, he is always on point, on message, on brand. The white nationalist Proud Boys may not have mustered many for their planned massive anti-antifa rally in Portland the other night, but they were immediately delighted by the president telling them to “stand down and stand by”.

The rest of the president’s mean-spirited stream of consciousness hardly bears talking about. The president acting like a petulant, spoiled child is, arguably, a national embarrassment, not unlike Lindsey Graham dragging James Comey up to the capitol today to interrogate him about being at the center of a cabal of traitors (presumably to Mr. Putin, Mr. Flynn, Mr. Stone and Mr. Manafort, among others).

Meanwhile, the New York Times, making like The Onion, gave me a smile with this headline, posted shortly after the debate ended:

[1]

an impolite and mean-spirited person.

• ARCHAIC a miser.
• ARCHAIC a person of low birth; a peasant.

A churl Old High German karal, in its earliest Old English meaning, was simply “a man” or more particularly a “husband”, but the word soon came to mean “a non-servile peasant”, still spelled ċeorl, and denoting the lowest rank of freemen. Wikipedia