If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Coronavirus — A Zombie Debate and a Serious Concern
Last night’s Ides of March audience-less Democratic debate looked like a scene out of White Zombie with both candidates fighting for the incoherency award, mainly over COVID-19 response.
Had the DNC allowed Tulsi Gabbard to debate — they disgustingly changed the rules to exclude her — she would have been like Madeline in the 1932 movie:
Madeline: “Driver, who were those men we saw?”
Coach Driver: “They are not men, madame. They are dead bodies!”
Regarding the coronavirus discussion that took up most of the first half hour of the debate, (I watched it all and I’ve scheduled my 12-step Debates Anonymous meeting for next week.) one must go to foreign media to get the real story. “The former vice president, Mr Biden, appeared to stumble over the names of previous viruses, and incorrectly referred to swine flu as coronavirus. Mr Biden had cited previous American attempts to manage coronavirus — before correcting himself by wrongly labelling the 2009 H1N1 “swine” flu as N1H15….Mr Biden also appeared to forget the name of the Ebola virus, referring to the virus as ‘what happened in Africa.’” (1)
The same article said, “Mr Sanders also appeared to confuse Ebola with coronavirus. The Vermont senator said that “the Ebola crisis, in my view, exposes the dysfunctionality of our healthcare system.” Most people of that age have senior moments, so they say. But really, future presidents of the united states? I say
WTF?
The good news is that the candidates told us like good little toddlers that they wash their hands, “I’m using a lot of soap and hand sanitizers…” said Bernie. And not to be outdone Joe said, “I wash my hands God knows how many times a day….” That was about as specific as they got all evening. As I watched, I wondered when the nurse would arrive to break up this geriatric verbal fisticuffs taking place in the elder-care common room.
It’s not that the candidates don’t care, it’s that they have a rough time staying on point. Every barb is a trigger they feel they must address and they have to walk around the block twice before opening the door, so to speak.
Bernie, I think, just feels he has to address any mischaracterization before answering a question, and he frequently heads to the systemic and structural change he thinks is needed, which is great, I’m fully supportive. But this going big doesn’t work well when a question asks for a direct answer. Example: “If you were president right now, what’s the most important thing you would do tonight to try to save American lives?”
His strategy looked like this to me: Bernie tried to give his structural answers, his ongoing talking points, but questions had been designed to diffuse his power points. Questions asked for specific responses in the form of what would each candidate would do at this very moment, which is not about structural change. It also seemed that Bernie tried, at times to destabilize Biden’s composure because recent history shows Biden doesn’t do so well when the situation gets confusing. Remember he recently called student Madison Moore a “lying dog-faced pony soldier” (2) and he got in the face of a worker at an auto plant in Detroit and told him he was “full of shit” and then said, “Don’t try me, pal…Do you want to go outside?” The man replied, “You’re working for me, man” to which Biden answered, “I’m not working…don’t be such a horse’s ass.” (3) Then, according to the article, Biden denied he ever said it. In the immortal words of James Thurber, you could look it up. The video is on the net.
It also seemed to me that the moderators worked hard to shut Biden down as soon as he strayed from the exact point, to cut him off and immediately ask Bernie to add to the subject. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a bit of a meeting between the handlers and the media beforehand to ensure he didn’t exhibit confusion. Careful viewers would also have noticed that Biden was broadcast straight on, full frontal like a news commentator, while Sanders was broadcast looking to our left, past us toward the questioner table. People in this business know exactly what they’re doing with cameras, and in my view this was a subtle means of generating bias.
“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.” ~ Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
The current modus operandi by the media is to simply add a question mark after any statement offered so that if accused the author can back out and say they were simply inquisitive.
Is coronavirus and end-time biblical plague? Brown, M. (March 2, 2020). WND.
Does Joe Biden Have Dementia? Does it Matter? Bauer, E. (March 11, 2020) Forbes.
Is the DNC Rigging a Presidential Primary — Again? Dorstewitz, M. (March 15, 2020). Newsmax.
Rigged? How dare they. Do we think it was simply coincidence that all the other Democratic candidates dropped out about the same time and fully endorsed Biden? Was there an offer they couldn’t refuse such as you’ll never work in D.C. again? Do we find it odd that so many primary exit polls showed Bernie having a clear lead and when the votes came in Biden won by a lot?
If the past is any indicator of the present we might find an answer. In the article titled “DNC: We rigged primaries. So what?” Alicia Powe wrote, “Internal DNC emails only confirmed allegations of the DNC’s rigged primary system, underscoring deep-rooted corruption.” She adds a few paragraphs later, “DNC lawyers justified the party’s right to select candidates through ‘back-room’ deals and tip the scale for the establishment’s preferred primary candidate.” (4) Do you find evidence it’s happening again? If so, you can add your name to a change.org petition titled DNC: STOP RIGGING THE 2020 DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL NOMINATION AND CONVENTION.
We’re now in a catch-22. If things continue this way, we are seemingly going to get Biden vs. Trump. I’m for Bernie if you want know where I stand. But if it comes down to Biden versus Trump I’d vote against Biden, just like I would have voted against Hillary. (I don’t vote because I’m aware that popular votes don’t matter). Now people by the propaganda by mainstream news media that says Bernie means Stalin and starvation.
How anyone wouldn’t want workable free universal healthcare for everyone confounds me. In retaining healthcare that is neither free nor universal, the USA basically sits only with central Africa, the Middle East, and China. Most countries in the world basically has free and universal health care. Yet, watch US news and you’d think the only thing that remotely works is the pay, pay, pay for play American healthcare system.
Similarly who wouldn’t want their kids to go to public university without staggering amounts of debt? Free university education is offered all over the world, from Brazil to Malta, from Mauritius to Iran, from Thailand to Russia, and more. But again, to listen to US mainstream media you’d think there’s no alternative to near a hundred thousand dollars for four years of undergraduate education. On these points Bernie is absolutey right.
To the rich politicians and talking heads on the US airwaves he’s wrong and that implementing either of these, which would solve a myriad of problems for normal people, would send the country to ruination overnight, if not in the next hour. It’s simply ridiculous.
But I want to come back to Biden and his mixups on the viruses during last night’s debate. Look on the net or watch some of the non-partisan news and there is a lot of concern about Joe Biden and whether he has some form of dementia. “Bingo!” To use one of Joe’s favorite words. I don’t even need to start quoting news sources on this one, there’s just that much out there. A political forum titled “I am a doctor. I have serious concerns about Joe Biden’s cognitive health” will do just fine. One person who claims to have cared for countless patients in all stages of dementia says, “I’ll leave the moral arguments to be debated elsewhere, but as a doctor, I have grave concerns that Joe Biden is in the early stages of cognitive decline….I’ve grown increasingly suspicious of Joe Biden’s cognitive capacity…. Compared to video features of him from just 4 years ago, there is a striking difference in his verbal fluency, concentration and memory/recall, all of which can decline in dementia….It has also been alarming the extent to which Biden is kept out of public….This seeming avoidance of public cognitive engagement in combination with the high degree of cognitive blunders when Biden is present in the public eye raises a question: does Biden’s campaign suspect dementia? Even worse, has it been confirmed and are they intentionally trying to conceal it from the public?” (5)
Ted Rall, writing in the Japan Times said, “This is no time to be ‘polite’. We are talking about the presidency.” So he considered both Trump and Biden. “Trump is not merely a jerk. Psychologies have been so alarmed that they have violated a core ethical principle of their profession by attempting to diagnose him from afar. Narcissistic personality disorder is their universal conclusion and it fits like a glove.” As for Biden, Rall said, “Now Democrats are conspiring to gaslight the American people by engineering the presidential election of a man clearly suffering from dementia….”If you have encountered dementia, you know Biden has it.” (6)
But apparently the party level establishment thinks either Biden is owed a participation crown, or they’re really that afraid of real change.
So we go forward with Biden and what do we get? Let’s not forget that as I write this, you can watch a video titled “Judicial Watch’s Tom Fitton: Hunter Biden Scandal Isn’t Going Anywhere.” Judicial Watch filed a number of lawsuits on what they called the “Biden-Ukraine-China scandal.” (7) And as of March 2020 numerous new sites reported the Senate Judiciary committee is preparing to issue subpoenas in a “Burisma, Hunter Biden Investigation.” (8) It seems the Democrats have put all their chips on one number, the Biden 30330. But in yet again screwing over Bernie they may have settled for a highly flawed and problematic candidate, which just may mean, to use Biden’s words from a speech (in which he misstated his own name in a phrase about how he was a lifelong “Obiden Bama Democrat,”) “…we can only re-elect Donald Trump…” (9)
References
(1) Spocchia, G. (March 16, 2020). Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders forget the name of coronavirus and refer to previous viruses. The Independent.
(2) Lapin, T. (February 10, 2020). Student Biden called ‘lying dog-faced pony soldier’ says she was humiliated. New York Post.
(3) Moore, M. (March 10, 2020). Joe Biden tells Detroit worker he’s ‘full of s–t’ during argument over guns. The New York Post.
(4) Powe, A. (May 2, 2017). DNC: We rigged primaries. So What? WND.
(6) Rall, T. (March 11, 2020). Biden obviously has dementia and should withdraw from the race. The Japan Times.
(8) Zanotti, E. (March 3, 2020). Senate Panel Prepares To Issue First Subpoenas In Burisma, Hunter Biden Investigation. Daily Wire.
(9) Stocking, B. (March 7, 2020). A Confused Joe Biden Says ‘We Can Only Re-Elect Donald Trump.’ Townhall.
