Mark Steyn on the ‘Debate’ – The Plot Thickens

28 Jun Mark Steyn on the ‘Debate’ – The Plot Thickens

Posted at 11:34h in A C W T Statements by

There is a creepy feel to all the overwrought reaction to the Trump-Biden debate.  Joe Biden has been mentally unfit for office since before he ran in 2020; the 2020 election was rigged and stolen (you don’t even have to understand rigged voting machines to understand that the election was rigged; just look at the CIA-orchestrated ’51 intelligence officials’ pre-election letter that posited Hunter’s plainly authentic laptop as ‘Russian disinformation’); and ‘President’ Biden has been a puppet of the deep state from the beginning.

Every sentient adult knows Joe Biden is senile at best and knew it long before last night.  So what’s going on?

Removing Joe Biden from the Democrat ticket requires his voluntary withdrawal.  Jill Biden does not want to withdraw as First Lady, and so it’s very likely she is a roadblock to securing Joe’s ‘voluntary’ withdrawal.  DNC powerbrokers might threaten Jill that they will invoke the 25th Amendment to take Biden out of office entirely, but Jill could easily believe that threat is or has been a bluff…because the DNC doesn’t want to create a President Harris, who will be even more unpopular than Joe.  So Jill may have believed she could string this out to another mail-in ballot/rigged result for Joe.

But after last night’s debate, a DNC threat to invoke the 25th Amendment looks like much less of a bluff.   The American people are now being told by ALL media that Joe has to go.  So the debate changed the negotiating leverage with Jill Biden…just what the deep state needed.

A curious additional fact:  it was beyond weird that after seven years, the internet fact-checking ‘brand’ known as Snopes finally stepped in just days before the debate to debunk the ‘very fine people’ hoax (regarding Trump’s comments regarding a Charlottesville crowd stirred up by statue removals).  Joe Biden invoked this hoax to launch his 2020 campaign, and sure enough, he invoked it again in last night’s debate.  Only this time, even the partisan hack moderators knew that Joe was referring to a falsehood; they knew he was either plainly lying or plainly so out of it he didn’t know of the official Snopes de-bunking.  The feel of a setup over the status of the ‘very fine people’ hoax is hard not to notice.  Again, it helps the deep state engineer the result of getting Joe to drop out.

Mark Steyn is, as always, very astute in sizing up the situation (see below).  He suspects, with his compatriot-in-spirt, Neil Oliver, that ‘these things are happening because they [the deep state] want them to happen’.  Because the last thing the deep state is going to allow is the American people to elect their government.

Refuse to live by lies.

________________________

The Plot Thickens

Well, at least nobody bothered with the usual leaden rituals of American presidential debate.

There was no “spin” …other than this fairly half-hearted post-game revelation from NBC News:

Apparently, the poor chap came down with a “cold” forty-five seconds before airtime. Maybe that rebound Covid he’s prone to, or the avian flu.

And there was no “fact-checking”, because we’re way beyond that now:

On the other hand, he did claim that he “finally beat Medicare”.

And, most significantly, there was none of the usual pushback when the subject of Biden’s “cognitive decline” comes up. At that point, the bigshots fan out to assure us that I’ve worked for fourteen US presidents and Joe is undoubtedly the sharpest; he’s always the smartest guy in the room and on top of every brief and, whenever I think I can skate by on a few generalities about Ukraine, Joe peppers me with incredibly forensic questions about troop movements in towns in the Donbass I’ve barely even heard of; etc. Not a lot of that last night, even from Kamala:

The New York Times‘ take:

A Fumbling Performance, and a Panicking Party

Politico:

Dems freak out over Biden’s debate performance: ‘Biden is toast’

The moderators did their best. Here’s Dana Bash signaling to Joe the direction in which to point his head:

Was there anyone else on the stage? Not so’s you’d know from the headlines. Biden lost to himself. And considering that the object was to make the debate all about Trump that’s quite an accomplishment.

So what’s going on? Why did whoever’s running the show allow this to happen?

I’ve been of the view, ever since the 2020 primary season, that Biden is the Permanent State’s conscious response to Trump: in 2016, Trump was all candidate and no minders; Biden is all minders and no candidate. In that sense, the dead husk of a moth-eaten sock-puppet is the perfect embodiment of American politics. We can do all the cracks about “Obama’s third term” or “the Manchurian candidate”, but the truth is that, in a supposedly self-governing republic of 350 million people, we have absolutely no idea who’s actually running the show – other than the fact that, out of those 350 million, the only one we can definitively rule out of having anything to do with it is the purported head of the executive branch.

You have to figure that that’s greatly to the advantage of the Deep State, and that’s why they’d like to keep it that way. It’s quite something to teach the people the lesson that representative politics is just a meaningless joke, third-rate dinner-theatre in which all the faux-combat is an obvious sham. In the Soviet Union, the point wasn’t to persuade you to believe the lie but to force you to live with the lie. Reducing the two-year US election cycle to the same state inflicts an even more brutal humiliation on the masses.

So why weren’t they able, after a week-and-a-half of dosage experimentation, to shoot the stiff enough of the juice to pass him off as being back in his State of the Union top-of-the-game mode?

As my former GB News colleague Neil Oliver observed long ago on The Mark Steyn Show, formulating a useful rule of contemporary politics:

This is happening because they want it to happen.

Why would that be? Well, maybe because they’ve decided it’s time to move on to the next plot twist. Never-Trumper Michael Brendan Dougherty at National Review:

Trump May Have Done Too Much Winning Tonight

Oh, no! They laid the trap and he walked right into it!

Right now, MSNBC and CNN post-debate panels are openly talking about options for pressuring Biden to withdraw, or party officials conspiring to replace him at the convention anyway …and the selection between Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom would allow Democrats to feel like the party of the future again…

Could be, I suppose. But it’s important to bear in mind that there is no rational justification for this sudden “panic”. The squinting croaking zombie has been out of it for almost his entire “presidency”: at the G7 and the like, it’s accepted by every other nation that he will play no part in meaningful discussions and attend only one or two of the photo-ops, at which Meloni or Macron will be alerted to steer him back to the podium should he wander off because a comely six-year-old daughter of a deputy-assistant-under-commissioner of EU paper-shuffling has caught his eye.

And what’s the net result of all that? Right now the non-dead candidate of the opposition party is one-point-five points ahead in the Real Clear Politics poll of polls – and that’s well within the Democrats’ margin of fraud when the late-arriving ballots start being motored around in unmarked vans in the early hours of Wednesday morning.

In other words, an amazingly solid core of American voters are either ignorant of or relaxed about the prospect of Second Term at Bernie’s. Will this debate seriously shift those numbers?

We come back to some very basic calculations here, starting with the most basic of all:

Is the Democrat-Deep State-Big Tech complex willing to permit a free and fair election that Trump could win?

The answer to that remains: No. They’ve taken him off state ballots, they’ve raided his home, they’ve indicted him, gag-ordered him, convicted him of “crimes” that carry long gaol sentences, threatened to strip him of Secret Service protection, and are preparing to sentence him a couple of days before his party’s convention. George S Kaufman observed of the Germans after their invasion of Russia that they were shooting without a script. Not here, not in the essentials: there are four months to go and they will do what’s necessary.

The guys running this soap opera know the ending they’re working up to, and any unexpected plot twists en route are designed to serve that end.