{"id":9046,"date":"2016-09-27T13:43:37","date_gmt":"2016-09-27T17:43:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/?p=9046"},"modified":"2016-09-27T18:34:25","modified_gmt":"2016-09-27T22:34:25","slug":"the-debate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/?p=9046","title":{"rendered":"The debate"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"t-the-debate\"<\/a>
\nBlurry losers from a lost world watching Fox News and sagely repeating Republican talking points, the morning after the debate<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

Y’all knew that a rant was coming today, didn’t you?<\/p>\n

First, here’s my prediction for the debate, from an email to a friend a couple of hours before the debate started:<\/p>\n

Two things that give me hope about tonight\u2026<\/p>\n

1. Hillary will be totally in her element. She is a total wonk. She\u2019s been in congressional hearings so many times that she\u2019s accustomed to right-wing goons trying to entrap her and throwing sound bites at her. She\u2019s a lawyer. Whereas Trump is totally out of his element. He doesn\u2019t know shit. He\u2019s not a lawyer. He\u2019s accustomed to speaking only to the ignorati. His canned statements (what else does he have, since he knows nothing?) will sound canned, and his ad libs will be perilous for him.<\/p>\n

2. Hillary has been defined by other people for 25 years. Many goon-rods know her only through what the right-wing media say about her. An audience of 100 million people, many of whom normally would not see Hillary herself, will see Hillary herself tonight, unspun by right-wing media. She came off extremely well at the Democratic convention. She can do it again, but this time for a larger audience that includes far more non-Democrats.<\/p>\n

Unless something totally unexpected happens, she\u2019ll rip him to shreds, while smiling and keeping her cool. He will lose his cool and show his anger, smugness, nastiness, and self-love. The only catch is that a certain percentage of the electorate despise competence and love his nastiness. But I suspect that they\u2019re only about 30-some percent. The rest should get it.<\/p>\n

Ailes will have prepped Trump to appeal to the 30 percent. Everyone else will be disgusted.<\/em><\/p>\n

\nThis debate — like the impressively intelligent Hillary Clinton — went right over the heads of a large portion of the American public. Hillary talked about important and urgent issues that are never mentioned in the right-wing media, which panders to people who have no idea what government is for or what government does in the 21st Century and wouldn’t be able to understand if you told them. There was a funny story in the New York Times about words that were used during the debate that sent many debate-watchers to online dictionaries, including stamina<\/em>, temperament<\/em>, cyber<\/em>, “stop and frisk<\/em>,” and braggadocio<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Trump supporters, in short, can’t even follow a conversation about what’s involved in being president of the United States, let alone have a useful opinion on the subject. And yet they can vote. Much worse, there are so many of them that a large and highly profitable segment of the media industry arose to feed and flatter their stupidity and to manipulate their votes for the Republican Party.<\/p>\n

I was truly touched when Hillary Clinton spoke to those people outside the United States who have a very hard time understanding how Americans can be so ignorant and so vile, and how an orange clown like Donald Trump could be within a few percentage points of being president of the United States.<\/p>\n

To all the readers of this blog in Europe and other civilized places, I apologize for us Americans. Those of us with two or more neurons to rub together are doing everything we can not only to stop Donald Trump’s election but also to hasten the burial of the rotting corpse of the Republican Party. And if you happen to see Rupert Murdoch’s sons at a party in London or Melbourne, please plead with them to clean up Fox News with a water cannon and to start all over again, in reality this time.<\/p>\n

\n

About the photo at the top of this post: I had to go to the post office and stopped for lunch, since my political commitments cut into my cooking time these days. I sat down at an empty counter, not knowing that I had invaded the place where old white Republicans meet for lunch and to watch Fox News. Suddenly I was surrounded. They coughed a lot and were full of germs. I thought about moving, not so much to not have to listen to them, but to get away from the bad health and the germs. Their Social Security and Medicare bills must be such a burden on taxpayers! (Except of course to rich people like Trump who are smart and don’t pay taxes.) But I stayed so as not to appear rude, and, believe it or not, I listened to their outpouring of horse shit and ignorance through my entire lunch without saying a word. As I told a friend yesterday in email, I sometimes wish for a magic spell that would transport Acorn Abbey from the godforsaken Republican-infested Bible Belt to a quiet little dell in the Scottish Highlands. But normally I don’t deal with these people. There are deep woods between the abbey and them, and no one gets past the owls, crows, squirrels, rabbits, raccoon, bears, and white deer that guard this place against those who don’t know the password.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Blurry losers from a lost world watching Fox News and sagely repeating Republican talking points, the morning after the debate Y’all knew that a rant was coming today, didn’t you? First, here’s my prediction for the debate, from an email to a friend a couple of hours before the debate started: Two things that give … Continue reading “The debate”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9046","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-political-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9046","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9046"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9046\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9060,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9046\/revisions\/9060"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9046"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9046"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}