Category Archives: Ahimsa

Energy Vampire

Years ago an old friend, let’s call her Gina, decided that her old friend was not her friend anymore, in fact, that they were never really friends, in spite of their closeness in former times. She told others that the woman, in whose apartment she lived for a year or two decades earlier, was an “energy vampire” and everyone simply accepted that, like any of us, she had an absolute right to choose her own friends.

The old friend she rejected, and smeared as an energy vampire, was understandably devastated by this sudden repudiation. In my experience she is not an energy vampire, but the charge was enough for people who barely knew her to assume that Gina had every right to cut ties to someone who was demanding and emotionally draining. I had zero insight, at the time, into the narcissistic psychopathy of dear Gina, the woman who decreed her former close friend a life-draining energy vampire.

Fast forward a decade or so. I now have 100% insight into the raging personality problems of this damaged, controlling, easily enraged, terminally insecure woman of great charm, and former beauty. I, in fact, was reckoned far more dangerous than an energy vampire and she and her sychophantic [1] husband (she holds a humiliating secret over his head and she’s not shy about playfully flaunting it) deliberately assassinated my good name among a group of old friends.

I had a call the other day from a friend in France. At one point he mentioned a satire of a reality TV show called What We Do In The Shadows. A film crew lives with a group of vampires. He was laughing that the most feared vampire in the house doesn’t drink blood, it is an Energy Vampire. He’d never heard the term, he loved it, and he described the creature beautifully.

The energy vampire finds an empathetic listener, plays to the person’s kindness and then proceeds to latch on and suck them dry by droning on with the most boring possible monologue for hours on end. The energy vampire preys on its victim’s empathy and is expert at eliciting sympathy as it moves in for its long, painful drink. Once it senses kindness it gets its hooks into the person and never lets go until it has drunk its fill of the nice person’s empathy.

If we are too nice we can fall victim to these creatures, sure enough. That’s why maintaining healthy boundaries is so important.

Thinking more about energy vampires, and that unfair charge my old friend Gina made against her old friend, I realized how ironic Gina’s smear is. For one thing, Gina is not the least bit empathetic, though she does a convincing performance of it socially. Feelings make her very uncomfortable and she is adept at making anyone who needs to talk about feelings feel weak and pathetic. Energy vampires are powerless against someone like her, they will die of thirst if she is their only target.

Additionally, in her need for admiration, Gina is far more of an energy vampire than the woman she smeared as one.  The moment you question Gina’s right to control everyone else, she rages.  In her inchoate, irrational anger she is capable of things far worse than sucking someone dry of energy.  She is capable of anything any tyrant ever thought of.  I’d rush into the arms of an energy vampire to get away from someone as damaged and soul-destructive as her.

[1] sycophantic

  • Of or pertaining to a sycophant; characteristic of a sycophant; meanly or obsequiously flattering; courting favor by mean adulation; parasitic.
    Similar: parasitic
  • Given to obsequious flattery.
  • Attempting to win favor by flattery.

The GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English •

Deleterious Cognition finally defined

I had a concept in mind, since taking my first philosophy course at City College: deleterious cognition. I knew what it meant, knowledge that can only hurt you with no possibility of helping. I like deleterious cognition as a phrase, but I always had a devilishly hard time defining it (just like ‘catastrophizing pain’, a potentially revolutionary modality for pain management, but for the lack of an agreed on definition). The chairman of the philosophy department, KD Irani, after listening with a furrowed brow to my struggle to define my term, suggested that I might be referring to cognitive dissonance. I wasn’t, but, at nineteen, I couldn’t explain exactly why.

The other day, after an alarmed, alarming call from a kidney specialist about things that showed up on a recent CT scan, I had a moment of insight.

Deleterious cognition is a rumination on actual known facts with no hope of coming to anything but more fear, anxiety and other psychic harm.

In other words, had I taken up any of the numerous email invitations to see the full results of these worrisome scans, I would only open the door to deleterious cognition. I’d be looking at cold scientific facts, context free, with no option but to worry more. Hence, any cognition based on a scary report I have no intelligent way to interpret would be deleterious. Better to wait for a medical consult with someone who can put the scary facts into perspective and offer the best options.

A stickler would quibble about ‘cognition’ in that phrase, since the word means “mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses”. Can a terrified worst case scenario reading of scary medical information, without context, be called ‘cognition’? Who the fuck knows?

All I can say is that pondering the worst facts presented to you, fully considering each terrible piece of information and all of the inevitable extensions, reasonable or not, without the proper training and experience, can only lead to deleterious cognition.

Terror of humiliation leads to violence

Some people who experience trauma as young children never escape the cycle of emotional violence and neglect they were raised in.   Parents who routinely neglect or humiliate a child do this because of their own inescapable pain.  Why wouldn’t a parent incapable of nurturing a young human being seek help?   It is humiliating to them to admit they are not perfect and all-knowing, and besides, our culture doesn’t offer this kind of help to “losers.”  The child, therefore, is the problem, demanding, weak, selfish, needy, emotionally draining, never happy, critical, hypochondriacal, crazy, ungrateful, unfair, vicious, etc.

Much easier for someone who can never be at fault to have a long list of their child’s critical defects, never mind that the child is three months old, or a year old, or three days old, for that matter. It is well known that some babies are born placid and “easy” while others are more agitated and “difficult”. It is the pure bad luck of a parent who can never be wrong to have the latter kind of baby and absolutely no fault of their’s if the child grows up to unfairly harbor ill will toward them.

I don’t have much sympathy for the authoritarian personality.  I have almost none.  It is a shame, terrible, regrettable, lamentable and to be mourned, seeing a parent like this with her child, but sympathy for the moral dilemma of the snarling, other-blaming autocratic parent?  None.

I’m sure most childless cat ladies and cat men, and many parents, feel the same way about domineering parents who angrily insist on blaming their children for the parents’ unresolved issues and inadequacies.

Imagine my horror, sharing a vacation house with a couple of old, dear friends who were seething at each other day after day.  Watching the manic discomfort of their oldest son when he came by, the mother’s clear inability to connect with this unconventional young man, the father’s amiable attempts to be a good guy, even though he was unable to protect the kid from even the worst abuse when his son was young, or ever. 

As their anger at each other simmered and escalated, and I later found out they often go days locked in a silent battle of the wills, I fell deeper and deeper into the quicksand of someone else’s unresolvable pain.  I had seen too much, too clearly, too horribly, humiliatingly.  In the end, if I didn’t stop insisting on my own right not to be abused, which I eventually was, I would have to be killed.  They made it crystal clear.  Every single time.  They would rage, storm out, insist the only problem was me, that I am unloving, unforgiving and disloyal.   I suppose witnessing their rage at each other made me all of those things.

So when the lynch mob of the rest of my old friends came for me, disorienting and painful as it was, I could only thank God for a neck made super strong and resilient by decades of working to restore my neuroplasticity, the ability of the emotions and intellect to roll with the fucking punches without getting destroyed.

I find it is helpful, when facing an unfair attack, to keep in mind that “all violence is an attempt to replace shame with self-esteem.”

Triumph of the Will, USA style

Those who need to control others always use force to inflict their will on the resistant. Whatever force is at their command will be used to crush the will of others. The ultimate weapon is making people good and dead — either physically or by destroying their good name among the people who love them. The terror of death is the last thing you want to have visited on you, once you see it in action. It tends to keep the ones not brutally killed, not made gruesome examples of, in line with the leader.

You will grimace at the soul ripping power of this violent force if you’ve ever had your good name assassinated. You will also know the force of maniacal will if anyone you love has been bullied, beaten or killed, physically or spiritually, after insane accusations of defiance or heresy. There is only one kind of sick fuck who gladly inflicts pain on others, though there are many variations in style. The common theme is force, and their willingness to use unlimited amounts of it against others in the user of force’s desperation to command obedience.

Use force to make ten year-old victims of rape carry the rapist’s baby to term and deliver it alive. Use force to punish any doctor who performs the abortion on the already traumatized girl. Use force on the cab driver who takes her across the border to a state where abortion for rape victims is still available. Use force to rip children from the arms of their asylum seeker/migrant parents at the border. How about this for force — keep no records of where you send these poor kids so the parents have no hope of ever seeing them again. Revive the death penalty, make it as common and normal as political lobbying. Use force to make people obey your religion, post its Ten Commandments in every classroom while you abolish the Department of Education. Forcefully abolish affordable health care for millions because, just because — if a poor person wants health care, beg your boss for it, bitches. Abolish the right of labor to organize, while we’re at it. Permanently end a child tax credit that took millions of children out of poverty while that credit was lawful. Promise to take millions of people, at gunpoint, to concentration camps for mass deportation.

The party of personal freedom, local control of government, limited government, law and order, no regulations on businesses, the MAGA party, embraces the violent coercion of people they hate. Americans are free to obey, or die. Local government is perfect, if it agrees with our pious national will. Limited government is necessary to command obedience, for those who would be obeyed. Strict, inviolable law and order for the poor and dispossessed, complete immunity for the ruling elite. Agents for the super-wealthy will decide if anti-pollution policies cost their patrons too much to be enforced. Religious Christians will decide what can be taught in schools, publicly debated, and what is heresy that will be strictly punished. Argue with the will of God on pain of death, accursed heretic!

We’ve seen fascism in many places in the last hundred years. It is an updated variation on the absolute right of history’s bloodiest Divine Right kings, fighting Popes and the unquestionable rule of our superiors and the armies that enforce their will. The main demonstrator of political superiority, as far as I can tell, is an open willingness to use deadly force to destroy anyone who would contest your incontestable will. I have seen these motherfuckers in action many times in my own life, and in the end, once conflict arises (and this taype can only react to conflict with aggression and threats of force) each must be met with rejection. To tolerate someone forcing you to abide by their beliefs, violently requiring you renounce what you know is right, is a worse death than the one those who must be obeyed will try to inflict once you walk away from them.

Irrational faith vs. reasonable conversation

It is impossible not to notice the ungodly strength of irrational “arguments”. Just scan the alarmingly skewed headlines and editorials of the fucking New York Times. Once an irrational belief is embraced, that’s all she wrote, boys and girls.

A person of unquestioning faith cannot be persuaded by facts, videos, secret recordings, written evidence, sworn testimony, a mountain of reasonable arguments for doubt or skepticism. This is the beauty, and unparalleled horror, of true belief. If you believe, say “amen”, and you no longer need to care in the least about the so-called “truth”. The truth you now believe will set you free (from ever needing to argue about truth again.)

That other truth, let us be clear, is the truth of heretics, infidels, God deniers, Christ killers, pedophile cannibal left-wing billionaires, libtards, cucks, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, etc.

Every tyrant, every leader around whom a cult of personality is built, every psychopathic CEO, every greed demented luster after thousands of millions of dollars, requires a belief system in which their quirks and abuses are seen as unquestionable virtues. You may not question this belief system without being portrayed as [insert your favorite dismissive expletive]. Now let us all say “amen”, it is so [1].

The horror is that humans, under pressure, will act as cleverly as lemmings in their desperation to save themselves, to survive, thrive, be part of something bigger than themselves, part of a true religion, true cult, true family or true couple. There is no human collective too small to be immune to this unilateral imposition of will, and demand for unwavering faith, from someone claiming the right to rule.

It is the shame of being human, witnessing the constant, thoughtless embrace of angry, sometimes murderous, irrationality. The worst of it is that these murdering mobs truly believe that all-mighty, all-powerful, all-merciful GOD told them it is their holy duty to slaughter. Holy shit, my friends.

[1] amen (interjection): used to express solemn ratification (as of an expression of faith) or hearty approval (as of an assertion). [Merriam Webster]

Time to wake up, voters

My concern about the power of a pugnacious partisan postmaster to not deliver millions of ballots, a guy who has already crippled mail delivery nationwide, has been met by silence or dismissal from every one of my elected officials and everyone in progressive media I’ve contacted. Here’s what a Democratic strategist I contacted wrote back to me.

I’ve read the proposed headlines below. This is out of my area of expertise, but these sorts of fears were very prominent in 2020 when Trump was president and Covid was making mail in ballots central to the election. When we looked into them then, they didn’t materialize. I don’t have more information than that. 

Here were my proposed headlines:

headline one:  Trump megadonor Postmaster General has the ability to halt delivery of millions of mail-in ballots from selected zip codes

headline two:  Federal Voter Suppression Scheme, under color of law, in full effect

This guy clearly suffers from smartest man in the room syndrome. There’s a lot of that myopia going on among our best and brightest public champions of democracy these days. Dismissing concerns about a corrupt partisan postmaster using his discretionary power to help his candidate, since it didn’t happen four months into his now four year reign, is as asinine as insisting that, clearly, since the January 6th attack on the Capitol didn’t bring democracy down, there is no reason to be concerned about it or anything like it anymore.

I intend to write back to him like so:

Subject: Instant expertise:

You dismissed this concern when I raised it the first time, since, in spite of similar fears, it didn’t happen in November 2020 when DeJoy had been postmaster for a few months.  Now it is four full years, full-steam ahead on “Delivering for America”, the Postal Regulatory Commission’s urging DFA be suspended until after the election be damned.  You conceded a lack of expertise in this matter.  Here is some information you need:

In 2020, during the depths of Covid, 66,000,000 votes were cast by mail, 43% of all ballots cast.

34,248,000 mail in ballots were cast in the 2022 midterms, 31.8% of 107,700,000 total votes cast in that high turnout midterm election  source Beyond that, numbers for mail-in voting have been on the rise since 2008.  source

DeJoy claimed, in his recent PR piece in the Washington Post, that in August 2023 there was a 98% on-time rate for mail delivery coast to coast. He is silent about what the current on-time delivery rate is. I wonder why.

We note that Senator Jon Ossoff reported on-time delivery from the new Atlanta processing and distribution center was 98% in 2022, 52% in 2023 and 72% YTD 2024.

This is not something to be concerned about, smartest man in the room? Do sixty seconds of research by clicking the links above to become an instant expert.

Please pass this on to your contacts, I can’t get anyone in government or media to give a rat’s ass about it and I’ve been trying for a solid month.  Hopefully someone in your network has a connection that can break through and get this issue public attention.  Otherwise we just have to trust that a MAGA partisan will not bend any rules, laws or norms to get his candidate elected.

Your best, most brilliantly targeted campaign donation advice will be in vain if my concern is even 20% true.  We’re talking about nationwide, easily targetable vote tallies 5-10 times larger than Biden’s robust margin of victory in 2020 (leaving aside the slim Electoral College margin).

Yours in the fight to save our fragile, problematic experiment in democracy,

Eliot Widaen

Remaining proactive

Coalitions of anti-fascists defeated far right candidates in the UK and France in recent days, following similar showings in Spain and Iran(!). Here, our corporations are tirelessly promulgating every story that can divide anti-fascist, pro-democracy voters. It is up to us to put this exceptional, seamless 24/7 American corporate storytelling from distracting us from the clear goal we need to focus on– defeating an enraged, entrenched, billionaire-funded reactionary movement determined to advance the interests of the 1%.

Is Biden old and senile? My personal view: old, yes, senile, no proof of it, outside of a humiliating performance in a live, unmoderated TV event billed as a debate. Biden quickly demonstrated he was OK, but the story was front page news day after day, pursued wildly by corporate mass media spinning into tales of Biden’s team criminally hiding his senility for years. The headlines were dominated, day after day, by calls for 81 year-old Biden to step down.

Even if Biden were to yield to unreasonable pressure and the blind terror of some of his fellow Democrats, is there any reason for him to step down prior to Trump’s Nuremberg rally in Milwaukee in a few days? Use your common sense. Why would Biden hand that propaganda win to Trump?

Whether Biden is the candidate (leaving aside the political and logistical near impossibility of replacing a presumptive nominee who won the primaries handily) is not an issue for us to take sides about right now. This is particularly true if we are determined to vote against Trump no matter who the Democratic candidate is. The Biden issue is a disturbing distraction, created to trigger the libs by pro-Trump propagandists. It was designed to divide us and take our eyes off the battle to defeat a party whose announced policies please the Klan, Nazis, Christians who prefer Trump to the teachings of Jesus, and the wealthiest 1%.

Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel in October, and the ensuing total war in Gaza, is being laid at Biden’s feet by reactionary propaganda. What is framed as Biden’s vicious war against the besieged Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank is not actually Biden’s war at all. MAKE HIM OWN IT ANYWAY, is the cry of all who would see Americans divided on this emotionally brutal issue. Was the murderous Hamas attack a criminal atrocity? Yes. Are war crimes being committed in Gaza? Yes. Does Israel or the US recognize the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court? No. Does Biden have any direct way to stop this cycle of deadly violence? No. Stop blaming Biden for crimes being committed by the radical right, racist government of our long time ally.

Trump has successfully moved elected officials and right wing judges to support his reframing of the several criminal prosecutions he faces. He loses all of these cases based entirely on the evidence already in the public record. He does not want a day in court to exonerate himself, knowing he can’t. Delay and running out the clock (or bankrupting his adversary) is always his goal and he got it, plus presumptive immunity for all criminal acts committed while he was president. The Georgia RICO case is now the DA Fani Willis, partisan whore who had sex with a colleague case. Under review by a Republican state Supreme Court. The Florida Espionage case is now, with an assist from Ginni Thomas’ husband, the sick and dangerous Jack Smith was illegally appointed case. Down the line.

The corporate press and cable news falls into line, because to corporate media, Trump has the golden click bait touch and they stand to make a shit load of money, as long as they stay on the right side of their golden calf (with a wink to you, Grey Lady).

On and on, down the line, media-driven divisive issues for Americans worried sick about the billionaire-funded march toward a Nazi America to gnash their teeth over and nervously snarl at each other about. Now several more House Democrats (including the otherwise respectable Jerald Nadler of NY) and countless columnists and cable pundits have come out saying Biden must step aside. Let’s fight about whether the Democrats are not being “reckless” in not creating a new process to force the winner of their primaries, the incumbent who presided over many of their greatest recent policy achievements to renounce his candidacy, shall we? The New York Times made a hell of a Brett Kavanaugh-like argument for that, doubling down on their Trump enabling demand the other day.

Biden has assembled an excellent and effective administration. His administration has accomplished an impressive amount for the citizens of this country, against organized lockstep opposition by the power-crazed party of Trump, the human embodiment of retribution. The president does not have to appear daily on TV to attack his critics, lie to voters, deny things he said the day before. The president assembles and oversees a team, and Biden has a first rate one. Trump’s people have assembled a guide for how to finally make a radical right president the unaccountable Unitary Executive and how he will ensure loyalty across the entire government for his extreme “bold and decisive” plans from day one. Trump denies knowledge of this reactionary blueprint for a fascist USA [1]. What else do you need to know?

Do not read the news and freak out, hard as that may be to do. Don’t pay much attention to the polls, most people who answer them are senior citizens with landlines and a rightward bend to their political views.

Remain proactive and take political action, no matter how seemingly small. There is much to do before our exceptional nation can act with the political maturity and pragmatism shown by the UK and France in recent days. Anything less and, I can say this with reasonable assurance, see you in the death camp, my fellow libtard cuck.

[1]

Happy Independence from tyrants day

We live in a nation that declared its independence from a tyrannical king (he ruled by Divine Right so it was impossible, by definition, that he could be a tyrant) by stating the “self-evident” truth that “all men are created equal.” So far so good.

Now, 248 years later, a small group of wealthy men who are more equal, more important, wiser, more deserving, infinitely more powerful, have loudly declared their own self-evident truth: power and wealth equals moral superiority and the right to impose that superiority on all inferiors.

Since the 1954 Supreme Court ruling that racist separation of people is inherently unconstitutional, these enraged, supremely entitled fuckers have been on the warpath against “activist” judges expanding constitutional rights. They have created their own powerful network of orthodox, doctrinaire, true believing activists united into a movement by a set of “conservative-libertarian” principles and the many well-funded influential “think tanks” that promote them. This network includes the Federalist Society, a judicial appointment machine, which has six of their fiercest proven culture warriors on the Supreme Court.

Not long ago it would have been unthinkable that “originalist” justices who can find no support in the original writings, debates and intent of the sacred Founding Fathers, no support in the Constitution or in judicial precedent, would create new binding law wholly out of their belief that their unappealable interpretation of the will of Jesus Christ and their mandate to protect vast wealth are, justly or unjustly, the last, final, unappealable verdict on all issues in democracy.

These proven activist “conservative-libertarian” members of a doctrinaire, political/moral ideologically-driven judicial fraternity have the last word in what is lawful and what is not. The scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency, a public protection outfit created by well-known Marxist Richard Nixon, do not get the final word on what is harmful to humans, the Federalist Society does. Women and girls have no constitutional right to bodily autonomy. The president, if he conspires to commit crimes with his official advisors in the room, may never be prosecuted if his VP, AG or Chief of Staff is one of his co-conspirators in the crime now protected, by six Federalist Society judges, as an official act — the Federalist Society will now decide if a given president is acting officially when he kills a political rival. Abortion is not healthcare, there is no environmental emergency, democracy is whatever we say it is, women and girls are not a protected class of citizens, go to hell libtard cucks, atheists and feminazis, we are overturning decades of totally unfair and sick radical Left activism!

July 4th is a day to take heart, my friends. The colonists’ rebellion against the will of the infinitely more powerful King of England, who rightfully owned the colonies, was launched with little hope for easy victory. The cause looked doomed early on and for most of the war of independence.

American authoritarians have been hard at work for seventy years to bring about this historical moment when they could turn back the clock to the days when insatiable white Robber Barons were great — no regulation of polluting industry, no labor laws, no bodily autonomy for females (even raped ten year-olds), no laws against the human right to be racist, even violently so, no fixing the environmental crisis we face, unlimited assault weapons for angry, even insane, white men, no voice of the masses of American voters in deciding matters of public urgency, no more “majoritarian tyranny”!!!

I say to my fellow Americans today, on the anniversary of the launching of our always delicate experiment in democracy and striving toward human equality: fuck those fucking putos. This is a moment for courage and true patriotism, all hands on deck.

In this perilous moment, faced with choosing problematic democracy or American Nazism, we must all fight to preserve the freedoms we have and recover the ones recently taken from us by six unelected members of a radical right judicial fraternity who were selected by their fellow fanatics (and five of six appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote) for their proven devotion to their anti-democratic cause. Fuck those fucking putos.

Stay strong and don’t lose your focus. Happy July 4th!

Trauma produces empathy or sadism

When a person survives trauma, particularly early in life, at the hands of family, the people who are supposed to protect the child, there seem to be only two responses. Some people emerge hurt, damaged and empathizing with others who are hurt and damaged. These people can heal to a large extent, with sufficient help, determination and luck. Tragically, many people emerge from childhood trauma hurt and damaged and intent on never being hurt again, convinced that they can never be at fault for anything, recruiting admiring allies and preying on people they perceive as weaker than them. These people are trapped in a lifetime cycle of abuse they will pass on to the next generation and beyond.

You come out of trauma either more fully human or a kind of bullying monster. I have no idea what the deciding factor in this outcome is, beyond some loving adult in position to support the abuse victim and help them through their pain at crucial moments in the young person’s development.

Everybody knows the only thing that stops a bully is the equivalent of a hard punch in the face. It stops them in their tracks, every time. They will not fight somebody once they are afraid of being beaten to a pulp, looking bad, being exposed for their cowardice.

Nothing is more terrifying to a bully than the thought of “losing”. When this happens they whine, threaten, claim to be the victim, lie, make excuses, change their story wildly, completely stop making sense in any way we can understand, beyond being the predictable, desperate shuffle these creatures always do when they feel terrifyingly disoriented and threatened.

Application in Politics

Bullies who unite under a banner of religious faith, patriotism and “exceptionalism”, who have unlimited money to influence political outcomes, and a smart, unappealable way to obtain more and more power (say by arranging to have six of nine members of the country’s highest court members of its doctrinaire, activist conservative-libertarian-Christian judicial fraternity) are very hard to beat. You can’t step up to a political movement and punch it in the face. This is particularly true of a movement steeped in intoxicating mob violence and relishing any chance to unleash the deadly force of the state.

Fascists can only be defeated by the united courage of every citizen who opposes the rule of a few indomitable psychopaths, prone to any excess you can imagine. Very few original Nazi party members signed on gleefully imagining the day when millions of Jews would be killed, along with all political opponents, “degenerates” and other inferior “races”, in enormous, mechanized death centers. It was not their dream, though they all accepted it when it became reality because that’s what this type does. Murder of “enemies” is the predictable outcome when a party in power blindly follows the unquestionable will of a madman leader they have sworn an oath of loyalty to, on pain of death, which is always the case in fascism.

Joe Biden, who began the debate looking 130 years old, got rolled last night. His handlers agreed to a ridiculous format — two minutes to talk fast and one minute to rebut countless lies that were not fact-checked or questioned by CNN moderators, who then moved on to an unrelated topic/talking point. The format allowed for no nuance, virtually no back and forth on complex subjects — and no intervention by “moderators” no matter how outrageous the lie told was. I even heard one of the two corporate shills mention, right before Biden’s 60 second rebuttal, that seven states do seem to allow abortions even on the day of delivery, supporting one of Trump’s steamiest lies about Democrat [sic] infanticide.

It was a format that favored a compulsively lying con man over a thoughtful man who is also a lifelong stutterer. Biden looked so bad, so weak and doddering, rushing to answer a barrage of unchecked lies in 60 seconds and getting confused, that we had to shut the debate off a few minutes in. I understand that he found his footing later, and delivered some excellent points, and that virtually everything his confident, increasingly incoherent opponent said was a lie, but the first few minutes gave right wing media every clip and sound byte they could have dreamed of deep faking.

Before the debate it looked like a mute switch would squelch Trump’s pernicious tactic of talking over people, advantage Biden (wrong, the muted mic made Trump look restrained). The lack of an audience was seen as a major coup, as Trump feeds off his adoring crowds, advantage Biden, in theory. The format… uh… on a cable station that had moved to the right (falsely calling it the “center”) and allowed Trump a national “town hall” to spout his usual lies virtually unchallenged? What could go wrong? It was apparent three minutes in.

I thought Biden should have agreed to a drug test immediately prior to the debate. Biden clearly had not had so much as a cup of espresso before taking the stage. Trump, in contrast, spoke calmly and with unaccustomed focus and clarity (for him, anyway), even as virtually everything he said was a demonstrable lie. Every cognition and focus enhancing drug Trump’s surrogates baselessly accused “jacked up” Biden of taking — Provigil, Adderall, caffeine, cocaine, steroids, diet Mountain Dew, was undoubtedly injected into Trump’s ass (he wasn’t sniffing like a coke fiend this time) before he took the stage. I’d have loved to have seen Biden call Trump’s bluff on the drug test. How might the results of that test have changed today’s headlines calling for Biden to step down?

The sickening farce of the CNN debate will leave a stink for a while, and clips will be played continually during the campaign as Biden is portrayed as an ancient, weak, doddering, foolish, vain idiot incapable of accomplishing any of the many significant things his administration has objectively accomplished. The articles counting Trump’s lies, which probably number in the hundreds, will come out, and be met with yawns about Trump being Trump. We knew he was a snake when we took him in, as he likes reminding people.

This is the politics of our time, corporate mass media framing everything to its exacting profit-driven standards. Lying used to disqualify a candidate, as Biden himself was once booted for delivering lines as his own that were somebody else’s words. Lying is fine now in American politics, as long as it’s not under oath, and if it is ruled perjury, simply attack the law, the courts, the crooked judges, the rigged jury, the deep state, The Department of Injustice, the communists, the fascists, a Jewish billionaire, pedophile cannibals, criminally insane illegal immigrants, Muslims, Blacks, disloyal Jews who’d better shape up, intellectuals, elites, transsexuals, ten year-old rape victims, etc.

The work is still ahead of us and the job remains the same. Get the truth out to everybody who is still, somehow, “undecided”. Biden fell short on a night when he was determined to face down evil, a modern day Hitler if there ever was one. The only book the incurious very stable genius Trump ever cracked was the compendium of Hitler speeches he kept next to his bed.

Imagine the burden on Joe Biden, whose popularity based on his achievements should be very high, instead of at Trump level, standing alone against a dictatorial devil intent on unchecked power to punish his enemies, who was allowed to do his thing, with no interference from the “moderators”, determined to prove he was up to the task of wrestling Hitler to the ground and pinning him. How many of us would not appear a little shaky the first time a torrent of confident lies was spouted at us and we had sixty seconds to respond, without stuttering, without hesitating?

As always, Heather Cox Richardson has a brilliant analysis, today it is of the historic CNN debate.