Those Dirty Refs

I didn't watch the debate.  There's no need, as my perspective is already baked in.  There's nothing Donald Trump could say or do that would change my opinion of him at this point.  I mean, I suppose he could, but it's Mega Millions winning ticket improbable.  He's a buffoon unworthy of the office, and a danger to the moral and physical integrity of our Republic.  I chose to read some C.S. Lewis instead.

My wife, on the other hand, went to a watch party with her circle of Democratic Ladyfriends, so I figured I'd know how it all went by how she came through the door when she got home.  If she was grim, it was a Biden-esque disaster.  If she was angry, it was a close and tense exchange.

She bounced through the door exuberant, so it was clear it was not a good night for Trump, and that Harris had done as well as could be expected.

Online, the right wing folk I still follow were not nearly as happy, scrambling to spin the failure, with most of their ire aimed at the moderators of the debate.

When you complain about the referees, there's pretty much no question that your team lost.

We all know this.  It's a reality in all competitions, presidential debates included.  For supporters of the forty fifth president of the United States, there's no question that the moderators of the debate between himself and Harris are to blame for his loss.  He was repeatedly fact-checked, which is of course terribly terribly unfair and has nothing at all to do with his repeatedly saying things that are demonstrably untrue or delusional.

One could point out, I suppose, that both the venue and the rules for the debate had been negotiated by Trump, and that both the format and moderators had been approved by him.  Nonetheless, he'd been grumbling about it for weeks, pre-justifying his loss, planting the scripted rationale for his failure in the minds of his base.  Yet still, this was the best deal that he could negotiate, which...er...doesn't seem to say much about his deal-making skills.

But why should candidates be forced to negotiate and renegotiate the terms of every single debate?  That makes this sort of unbalanced shellacking far more likely.

Shouldn't there be uniform rules for debates?  What about an organization that made sure that everything is fair and agreed upon by a neutral arbiter, so that the debates are always on a consistent, fair and common ground?   It could be run by representatives of both parties, who would mutually determine where and when the debates take place.   That'd take the whole mess out of the hands of candidates and their campaigns, while insuring everything was on the up and up.

That would seem to fix the problem.  Not doing that is so unfair!

That was, of course, exactly what the Commission on Presidential Debates did for most of my fifty-plus-year lifetime.  Right up until 2022, when the Republican National Committee, under orders from former president Trump, announced that no Republicans were allowed participate in the Commission, and that the Republican Party would not cooperate with the Commission, because it had clearly been very very unfair to Trump in 2020.   

The CPD, which still exists, offered to organize and moderate three debates this year, which would have fallen on September 16, October 1, and October 19, following the logical process of only holding debates after the parties had finalized their nominees.

Trump and his campaign refused to go along, and instead negotiated a much, much earlier debate directly with the Biden team. 

We know how that worked out.  It allowed Biden's team to test their candidate early, giving the Democrats a chance to completely reset after his grimly weak performance.   Can you imagine what the race would look like today if the first 2024 Biden/Trump debate had happened last night? 

Who negotiated that?  Trump did.  Who's responsible for that?  Trump is.  He picked those refs, and that venue, and that timeline.  Yet still, he complains about how unfair it all is. 

It's almost like that's all he knows how to do.

Not up for Debate

I'm not sure, to be honest, why the upcoming debate is necessary.  

If at this point you can't tell the difference between Biden and Trump, or are operating under the assumption that they are basically the same person, I just don't know how to help you.

We know what a Biden presidency looks like.  We know what a Trump presidency looks like.

We lived through both.

Biden's presidency has looked more or less normal.  Not perfect, not ideal, but essentially competent.

Trump's presidency?  I mean, y'all were awake then, right?

Trump drove America deeper into debt than any president in history, and that was BEFORE the pandemic.  His handouts to the wealthy weren't matched with a reduction in government spending, so he bankrolled the whole thing using America's dwindling credit.  BEFORE the pandemic.  During the pandemic, he (and both parties, to be fair) just printed money and gave it away, which...er...is kinda why everything costs more dollars now.  It's almost like we didn't learn the lessons of Weimar Germany.

Trump's leadership was responsible for America having the highest COVID death rate of any developed nation.  If we'd done as well as, say, Germany, which has similar population density and equivalent average wealth, hundreds of thousands of Americans wouldn't have died.  He could have rallied Americans around our duty to one another, and to our nation.  He didn't.  He played to the basest of his base, sabotaged doctors and epidemiologists, and acted as a chaos agent when we most desperately needed clear vision and strategic thinking.

Think of the villainizing of Fauci, for pointed example.  Fauci was fine, right up until he obviously to any sentient being knew more about COVID than Trump.  Trump felt upstaged, his ego was pricked, and all of a sudden, Fauci was a monster in cahoots with the Chinese.  Heck, as far as Trump's base is concerned now, he might even have *made* the virus.  This is Demagogery 101, people. 

Trump was a friend to autocrats and despots, and the enemy of other democracies and republics.  He palled around with monsters.  All the while, he traveled to his own properties around the world, while insisting that the taxpayer foot the bill so his entourage and security could stay on his properties.  Three to six hundred dollars a night, per person?  That adds up.  Foreign powers and agents filled the rooms of the hotel he owned a short walk from the White House.  Politics, after all, can be a lucrative business.

He was the worst sort of boss, the kind of boss who hears nothing but what he wants to hear, who thinks he can do no wrong, who bullies and mocks and belittles all but those who suck up to him.  His "administration" burned through every competent staffer, retaining only those who were either in on the grift, a little crazy, or related to Trump by blood.   

Finally and most notably, Trump refused to accept, and still refuses to accept, the most basic principle of a constitutional republic: free and fair elections.  No election he loses can be fair.  They're all rigged, unless he wins.  Remember how he incited a riot in an attempt to intimidate Congress into abandoning its constitutional duty?  Remember that?  Remember how he had to be forced to concede by the armed forces, who weren't swayed by his lies and conspiracy theories?

Yeah.  Pepperidge Farm remembers.

I don't need to watch the debate.  

That a significant majority of American citizens still do is a marker of our integrity as a republic.  

Scary Christians

I somehow managed not to watch the GOP debate last night.

Well, actually, I completely forgot it was on.  After a day at church wrapping things up for my imminent departure, I'd come home to discover some parental heavy lifting needed to be done.  Ah, teens and their impulsiveness.  Discipline and firmness are necessary things.  Sigh.

Then, I discovered that my little guy had managed to leave his Everything-He-Needs-Is-In-It binder at school.  So off to look for it.  Then home, and in a break in the post-Lee monsoon rains, walking the dog.  Then to the store for fresh veggies for dinner.  And back to the store after forgetting something.

Dinner gets prepped, and the missus gets home, and there's more sitting on the teen, followed by the announcement--at 9:00 PM--that certain school supplies must be acquired by tomorrow.

In the midst of that, watching the candidates for the Republican nomination have at one another just faded into the chaos of the evening.

Perhaps it was a passive aggressive avoidance mechanism, the kind of thing one does to get out of a social outing to the house of that guy you sort of knew in college who keeps inviting you over.  You know, the guy who spends the whole time you're with him complaining about what a blanking-blank his ex is, and how much he blanking hates the blanking blank across the street and his blanking rodent kids who keep playing on his blanking lawn.

The reportage on the event seems to have affirmed this.  Front and center in the midst of the fray were the broad shoulders and clenched fists of Rick Perry, whose aggressive and combative style seems to play well with those who interpret bullying as strength.  Facebook and the Twitterverse were a-hum with both his truculent approach to Ron Paul and his celebrating the number of people Texas executes.

Which people...applauded.

Executing people is an applause line?  Really?   I guess the folks in the audience were the sort of Christians who aren't so much into the grace/love/forgiveness thing, but who are really into the idea of someone having to die for them.

And yes, I am assuming they are self-professing Christians.  It's an odd thing for me, as a follower of Jesus of Nazareth, to follow the GOP nominations process.  Odd because as I look at the candidates, the ones I find both reasonable and most aligned with the teachings of Yeshua Ben YHWH are the ones who talk about it the least.  You've got Huntsman, who is a really solid, balanced guy...and Mormon.  Then there's Romney, who is a bit too corporate for my tastes, but also Mormon and not halfway scary.  There's Ron Paul, who is a great proponent of liberty, and not as something you just say to get people to applaud while you strip them of their rights.  He understands it.  I don't think he gets the necessity of representative government as a counterbalance to profit-driven corporate power, but I respect him.

None of these guys have a chance, unfortunately.

The ones that do wear Jesus on their lapel.  The ones that do alarm me.  I used to think that Michelle Bachmann was the most frighteningly glazed-eye proto-fascist in the political spectrum.  That was before I got to know Rick Perry, who is all swagger...and really, really, really into telling people about how Christian he is.

Yet in his manner, I don't read the core teachings of Christ.  That tends to be true for most folks who wave Jesus around when running for office.

Why, why, why must the loudest shouters of Jesus be the most disturbing?

Ardi Ar Ar: The Answers of Answers

This is one of the hardest things for progressives and liberals to wrap their open minds around. Fundys, or so the reasoning goes, are all bible-thumpin' snake-handlin' Gamma-Minus types. They might be fit for serving us our food on the few occasions we find ourselves in a small town where our dining options begin and end with Dennys, but they're otherwise not worth our while.

Here, progressivism makes a rather significant error. Fundamentalist Christians are not idiots. They are also not bad people, any more so than the rest of humanity. Some of the most gracious and welcoming folks I've had the privilege to know have believed in the literal inerrancy of scripture.

The issue here is not one of intelligence. Case in point: Ardi.

Ardi, in the event you didn't hear about her last week, is the name given to a recently reconstructed early primate, who dates back 4.4 million years. Her discovery adds some interesting new twists to the dynamics of human evolution, as these fossilized remains are considerably older than the previous record holder, Lucy.

Upon reading about this new find, I immediately thought to myself: "I gotta see what Answers in Genesis says about this." Answers in Genesis lies at the intellectual heart of Young Earth Creationism, that strain of Christianity that is so vested in the literal inerrancy of Scripture that it feels compelled to assert that the universe is just a tick over 6,000 years old.

The day the findings were released, Answers...well...it didn't have any answers. It hadn't quite figured out the angle. It was working on it. Come back tomorrow.

The next day, the response was up, explaining why the discovery of this fossil was actually meaningless and should be of no concern whatsoever to Young Earth Creationists. The argument was coherently structured. It was well written. This was not the work of Sarah Palin without her ghostwriter.

It was, instead, the work of someone trained in rhetoric and practiced in the art of debate. I did forensics for a while in high school, and the core skillsets required to take apart the case of an opponent are strongly in evidence in the answers of Answers.

First, find the weakness. Here, things aren't great for Creationists. The paleontologists who unearthed Ardi are competent scientists, and their work has been extensively peer reviewed. It is an exciting, game changing find, one that may indicate a different evolutionary tree for homo sapiens sapiens than we'd previously anticipated. But a competent rhetorician can work around facts, which are only one tool in the toolbox of human argumentation.

Here, Answers chooses to use two things to it's advantage.

First, science is not presuppositional, and you'll invariably find dissenting opinions. To build a countercase, you have to find seeds of doubt and develop them. So Answers dug around in publicly available articles from National Geographic, and then selected some quotes that appear to indicate some issues. Not a single one of the scientists quoted would suggest that Answers in Genesis is correct on this issue, but that means nothing. Doubt is all that matters.

Apparently, these fossils are ancient and fragmented and fragile. Could they be so damaged that reconstructing them results in flawed conclusions? Hmmm. Of course, this line of argumentation doesn't relate at all to the ancient, fragmented, and fragile scrolls that provide the written foundations of Scripture. Totally different things. Totally.

Second, you know your audience. Most of us are not biologists and archaeologists. We just don't have the ability to critically assess the data. To develop a case against it, evidence is not necessary. Just the aforementioned doubt. In that sense, what Answers is doing is less like science, and more like the law. Like a prosecutor working in front of a jury, the only thing required is to discredit and subvert the witnesses of your opponent. Your job as a prosecutor is not to find the truth. Your job is to prove guilt. The "truth" is whatever serves your case.

Years ago, that's why I stopped doing forensics in high school. I could never find the enthusiasm to argue for something when I found the evidence for it flawed. It felt like I was engaged in a carefully constructed deception.

The challenge I have with creationists and literalists does not lie with their intelligence. It's their wisdom. Being able to discern the greatness and wonder of God's work creation requires a deeper connection with the First Book. By refusing to accept the witness of the earth and the heavens, they inadvertently discredit the core message of the Bible.

It's the distinction between idiocy and folly.