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A Forgettable Warped Debate

The September 10th presidential debate went down as expected. Summed up, it was Sappy and the Blob pile on Grouchy.

The swarmy and evasive Kamala Harris preened, posed, and proffered empty platitudes.

The ABC moderators proved they were predictably and shamelessly biased.

And an irate Donald Trump confirmed that he was too touchy and easily triggered.

Harris’s instructions were not to explain her agenda. She never defended disowning policies that she had embraced as a lifelong, self-confessed, “woke” “radical.”

Instead, Harris’s threefold strategy was simple enough—and it mostly worked.

One, goad Trump as a coward and racist. Then smile and call for unity, kindness, and an end to such name-calling.

Harris’s orders were to zero in on hair-trigger irrelevancies that would incite and sidetrack the thin-skinned Trump.

So, Harris claimed his massive rallies were failures, crackpot—and worst of all, boring!—as she falsely added that weary attendants left early.

All that was missing from her adolescent putdowns was Barack Obama’s earlier convention speech obscenity that Donald Trump supposedly suffered from undersized genitalia.

In Harris’s upside-down, projectionist world, ex-president Trump caused the Biden-Harris disastrous skedaddle from Afghanistan.

He was accused of being mostly responsible for the effects of the global COVID-19 plague that killed over 100 million.

And somehow Trump even appeased Vladimir Putin, who then oddly attacked his neighbors during the Bush, Obama, and Biden administrations but not Trump’s.

Harris mocked Trump’s businesses, claiming he was a failure. Those tactics succeeded, as a rattled Trump missed easy refutations of Harris’s naked mendacity.

The result was not an easy exposure of her lies but an off-topic defense of the size of his rallies and his wealth.

Two, Harris predictably once more reinvented herself.

She erased entirely her upper-middle class, privileged upbringing, as a child of two PhDs.

There was no mention that her radical political career was opportunistically gifted by her insider and paramour fixer, the married Bay-Area left-wing politico Wille Brown, over thirty years her senior.

Instead, Harris became a middle-class child of a struggling small businesswoman.

To cement that deception, Harris would now insist that she was always a border hawk, supported fracking, and was tough on crime. She claimed she never rallied the public to bail out violent rioters during the 2020 looting, arson, and violent demonstrations.

Harris promised to answer questions in detail but never did.

Instead, she recited scripted talking points to avoid explaining her opportune metamorphoses.

As the current vice president, Harris went mum on her apparent inability over the last three years—or in the next five months—to enact her “way forward” policies.

Three, everything else in the debate was outsourced to the ABC “moderators,” David Muir and Linsey Davis.

Both apparently calculated that if it was a question between blatantly helping Harris or appearing intellectually and professionally honest, then it was a no-brainer, partisan choice.

So, the two fact-checked Trump constantly, but never Harris once, and tried to warp the tempo of the debate.

Harris, without interruption or correction, recycled the old, discredited lies about Charlottesville, “bloodbath,” the 2025 project, and Trump’s supposed support for a federal ban on abortion.

When Trump frequently meandered off topic, the frowning moderators redirected him to answer the questions asked. Harris neither did nor was ever pressed to.

Debate rules supposedly outlawed hot-mic interruptions. But Harris was exempted.

Worse of all were the lopsided questions.

Muir and Davis fixated on the January 6 incitement. They ignored Harris’s national televised screed that the 2020 demonstrations that had proved violent neither would stop nor should stop, and as a “movement” would go on after Election Day.

When Harris lied that police on January 6 were killed by the protestors on a day apparently worse than September 11 (when 3,000 Americans were murdered), the two fact-checkers still kept mum.

Will the debate change the race?

Probably not.

Harris confirmed that she was slicker. But her habitual happy-face nodding has been seen over the last 90 days as facilitating her shallowness, stonewalling, and evasions.

Trump reestablished that he is fiery, quick-tempered, and easily provoked. But the country already knew all that from the last nine years.

Half the nation always felt Trump’s loose-cannon furor was well-directed against plastic politicians and the fusion media—and likely saw such confirmation in the debate.

The sappy Harris won the visuals; the grouchy Trump likely the issues.

But the real losers were ABC and its two partisan moderators, Muir and Davis.

Both managed to easily outdo CNN’s Candy Crowley’s infamous partisan sabotage of the 2012 debate between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama.

Just as we do not remember anything else about that spectacle other than Crowley’s career-ending interventions to aid Obama, so too did Muir and Davis confirm their shameless biases.

They sought to warp a debate, disgraced their network, and offered a good reminder why such media “moderators” should never be allowed anywhere near presidential debates.

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About Victor Davis Hanson

Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is an American military historian, columnist, a former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004, and is the 2023 Giles O'Malley Distinguished Visiting Professor at the School of Public Policy, Pepperdine University. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush, and the Bradley Prize in 2008. Hanson is also a farmer (growing almonds on a family farm in Selma, California) and a critic of social trends related to farming and agrarianism. He is the author of the just released New York Times best seller, The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation, published by Basic Books on May 7, 2024, as well as the recent  The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, The Case for Trump, and The Dying Citizen.

Photo: PHILADELPHIA, PA September 10: Former President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris during the presidential debate at National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, PA on Tuesday, Sept. 10, 2024. ABC News hosted the first presidential debate between Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris and Former President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump during the 2024 general election. (Photo by Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Notable Replies

  1. I enjoyed a brief laugh when tongue-in-cheek demands were made to charge Muir and Davis with illegal campaign contributions, but the joking highlights how far in the tank the legacy media is for the Democrat Party. The truth is that the media no longer feels it must hide its partisan bias. The good news is that immediate polling after the debate shows that few American voters fell for the charade. While even conservatives are willing to admit Harris did much better than Trump in the contest, the needle, if it has moved at all, trended slightly in Trump’s direction. And that is still very good news.

  2. Avatar for task task says:

    It will not be long before the media, which declared the Czarina with no clothes on, Queen, will itself be factchecked and it will be revealed that Harris is really an empty suit. D. Trump could have done a better job by pointing out the damage that has been done to women and children, via sex trafficking by the cartels. Also notable is that among the fentanyl deaths we can assume upwards of 50k are women. Women also pay for groceries and medical insurance. Harris is a one woman wreaking ball who just might ignite a nuclear storm.

    David Muir and Linsey Davis did a lot of damage to their credibility and in the not too distant future Harris will come away looking just as bad as Jussie Smollett. Without lies, conjecture, supposition and innuendo what exactly could she say? Everyone lives in a bubble and most Americans don’t shop, eat and live where Linda Ronstadt and Taylor Swift do which is why Muir and Davis have no idea regarding the videos all over TikTok supplied by people who are witnesses to the loss of park ducks and geese and the disappearance of their beloved pets. They don’t live among the victims. That is what the arrival of 20,000 Haitians in a small community has been about. The fact checking was about as dishonest as Bill Barr telling Americans, 3 days after the infamous 2020 presidential election, that there was no evidence of fraud.

  3. Avatar for Huey65 Huey65 says:

    The moderators “disgraced their network “??? Hardly. They were just following “marching orders” from those higher up in the food chain including Kamala’s “bestie “ from 1994. While it’s true that the moderators were a “disgrace”, that descriptor applies to the entire ABC network.

  4. Avatar for task task says:

    Yes, it does! If I were superstitious I might believe that the ghost of Goebbels is running the network.

  5. Harris lacks either normal self-awareness or her numerous smirks, grimaces, head shaking, and nods mark her as a more sociopathic personality than we understood her to be. Perhaps a bout of nerve-fueled overkill explains her many fabrications. But what explains Harris’ utter lack of genuineness? One can only find depictions of people like her in B-movies. She’s the living, breathing personification of an over-the-top characterization. Starting with extreme ambition wedded to a mediocre mind, you only have to throw in extreme ideological belief to produce a characterization that even Hollywood wouldn’t touch. The debate changed that paradigm, revealing that people like her exist in nature. Harris showed the part of her we had only seen in inconclusive snapshots. This isn’t to say the debate might have turned out more of a draw in the absence of her sociopathic behavior. But the mainstream thinking now is that this woman should not become president.

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