The moment political junkies and partisan players dreamed for arrived recently: Donald Trump and Kamala Harris had their first Presidential debate. And boy was it a shit show! Between Trump being, well, Trump, Harris being as vague and clueless as possible, and the two debate moderators all but being Harris/Walz 24 cheerleaders, the first (and possibly only) debate settled one thing.
Presidential debates have become the drizzling shits.
Although the quality of candidates has gone down faster than Bill Clinton’s pants at a nudist colony of Playboy Playmates, the candidates themselves aren’t solely to blame. It’s the debate moderators who are the #5 combo meal from Taco Bell that make the drizzling shits that much shittier.
debate moderators
What the Left thinks it means – journalists whose expertise adds gravitas to political debates
What it really means – political operatives disguised as journalists
If you’ve been reading my entries for any length of time (and if you haven’t, I can’t say as I blame you), you’ll know I have a healthy contempt for the modern media. And by healthy I mean professional body builder level. That comes from years of studying it, both in an attempt to become one and in critiquing it to better understand what I’m being told. Oh, and to write blog posts!
During these years, I watched reporters and journalists go from attack dogs to lap dogs, from the Fourth Estate to the Fifth Column, and other somewhat witty turns of a phrase. The minute journalism took a turn for the worst was when its practitioners realized they could advance personal and ideological agendas within their reporting. A sympathetic word here, a dismissing tone there, and before you know it…an echo chamber than puts the Grand Canyon to shame.
But I’m sure having an industry where the majority of participants agree with each other on most every issue and on who deserves to be discredited could never have an impact on how Presidential debates would be moderated, amirite?
Not so much.
When moderators turn into advocates, the Presidential debates turn into a situation that makes Custer’s Last Stand look evenly matched. We saw that with Candy Crowley, who did a live fact check of then-candidate Mitt “Mayo Is My Sriracha” Romney in his 2012 debate with then-President Barack “I’m Too Lame to Have a Nickname” Obama, showed the damage a moderator can have on a campaign. After she “corrected” Romney, his campaign was never the same. People saw Romney as a liar, and he ultimately lost the Presidency.
But there’s a reason why so many people remember Crowley’s interjection. Turns out she was completely fucking wrong. Of course, after Obama had secured victory and was cruising through his final term in office, that’s when the scrutiny got to be too hot to ignore. Crowley was never the same, but she managed to get the desired effect: reelecting a man who shouldn’t run a lemonade stand in the Sahara Desert let alone the most powerful country in the world. The damage was done, and the mea culpas were too late to be effective.
And then every moderator decided to get in on the live fact checking act with varying degrees of success and dumbfuckery. With Donald Trump, it was both easy and difficult to fact check him in real time because they “knew” he was lying, but the “sheer magnitude” made it hard to keep up. It must have been so tiring they forgot to fact check Hillary Clinton, Brick Tamland, and Kamala Harris. I mean, that’s the only possible explanation for their one-sided approach to holding politicians accountable, right?
Yeah, and if you believe that, I have swamp land in the Sahara Desert conveniently located near a lemonade stand that I’d love to sell you.
Although this concept seems to be lost on the current generation of media squawking heads, their job when moderating a debate isn’t to try to check facts of one side or the other; it’s to fucking moderate the fucking debate! I know that’s a lot of profanity for one statement, but it needs to be said in the hopes it penetrates their well-coiffed skulls.
And maybe this point needs to be reinforced. With the most recent debate, Trump spoke longer than Harris, which is something within the moderators’ power to address. Sure, cutting off mics or trying to interrupt the candidates when they bloviate are tools, but they aren’t as effective as a moderator saying, “President Trump, shut the fuck up!” Ideally, both sides should get approximately equal time and not let one or the other get the lion’s share.
Along with that, moderators should take it upon themselves to hold candidates to the same standard of questioning. It’s one thing if the questions are tough across the board and follow-ups are equally challenging. It’s quite another when one candidate gets more grilled than the dinner options at Steak-A-Palooza and the other gets questions no more challenging than “What is your favorite Taylor Swift song?” (The correct answer: none of them.)
But that’s part of the echo chamber the media find themselves in repeatedly. They want their side to win, but they aren’t willing to come out and say it for fear of the mask dropping too much. See, they want to be Leftist stenographers but they also want the protection against accusations of bias that come with being a journalist (or at least did before these fucknuggets ruined it).
And now this stench is affecting how debate moderators act.
Fucking yay.
Since we can’t trust the media to do the right thing, it’s incumbent upon us to hold debate moderators the way they treat any Republican to the right of Karl Marx: they’re fucking liars, and we know it. But instead of turning off the debates, we should really lean into them and see where the moderators’ biases lie. Once we get that figured out, we can determine how trustworthy they are and adjust our expectations accordingly. Granted, these expectations are bound to be lower than a snake’s belly button piercing, but at least you’ll have something better to do than listen to Kamala Harris dodge simple questions.
Tag: presidential debates
Leftist Lexicon Word of the Week
After a particularly disastrous performance in any venture, there are usually two groups of people: ones who reflect, retool, and try again, and ones who point fingers trying to find a scapegoat. This past week, CNN got a load of people from the Left doing the latter after their debate between President Brick Tamland and Donald Trump.
Well, unless you want to go with the idea Donald Trump zapped the President with an energy weapon that made him look like, well, himself.
And this Leftist dumbfuck wasn’t the only one. Leftists all over the Social Media Network Formerly Known as Twitter came up with any number of excuses, but the general consensus was CNN fucked President Tamland.
And now we’re going to see why that is quite possibly the shittiest take ever.
CNN
What the Left thinks it means – a cable news network who is in the back pocket of Donald Trump
What it really means – a once and hopefully no longer DNC stenographer
I know I’ve gone over some of this stuff before, so I’ll keep it brief. When CNN first went on the air, it was a media marvel. A 24 hour news channel that you could tune in to any time of the day or night and get caught up on the day’s events. It was novel and changes the face of news forever.
Over time, though, the novelty wore off and they had to start generating buzz (and revenue) somehow. And, let’s face it, Bernard Shaw Is My Daddy t-shirts weren’t exactly flying off the shelves. Then, the first Gulf War came about and CNN got a whole new set of eyes on it. And with those eyes came a feeling of invincibility. No one else could do what they did as well as they could do it. They were Kings and Queens of the Mountain.
Which made them cocky and sloppy. Over time, their on-air talent and their talent behind the scenes started letting their political biases creep into the product. And eventually, the network started being called the Clinton News Network after its mostly favorable coverage of President Bill “I Don’t Know Where My Pants Are, Why Do You Ask?” Clinton.
And if you thought CNN wanted to slob Slick Willie’s knob, watching them cover Barack “I Don’t Know Where My Balls Are, Ask Michelle” Obama would make even the most tenured sex worker look positively virginal.
Put simply, CNN is in the tank for the Left. So, it boggles the mind how the Left could even consider CNN to be on Trump’s side. Even the two moderators of the Trump-Tamland debate were on record as being critical of the former President. And in Jake Tapper’s case, that criticism was rather pointed. So, when they handled the debacle…I mean debate with a fairly even tone, I was honestly surprised.
And apparently so were the Leftists. They wanted Tapper and Dana Bash to fact check Trump on the spot instead of letting him say what he wanted. (No word yet from these same Leftists if they wanted the two to fact check Biden in the same manner, by the way.) But there’s one tiny problem with that approach: they were moderators, not fact checkers. And after the Candy Crowley debacle in 2012, I would think Leftists wouldn’t want moderators to let their masks slip that much.
This change from being a reliable Leftist media outlet to something closer to centrist is by design. Recent leadership changes within CNN signaled a move back towards the straight news reporting they were once known for while allowing for a narrower focus on prominent news stories. While still not quite as centrist as some would say CNN is, they’re at least acknowledging there’s room for improvement.
Which, of course, makes Leftists lose their collectivist shit.
The thing is it’s frightfully easy to be a Leftist media outlet. All you need to do is find a way to keep money rolling in since you’re preaching to the same choir night after night. CNN used to be able to do this, but with the advent of MSNBC on the further Left and Fox News on the Right, it found itself trying to appeal to both sides and making nobody happy.
Why, it’s almost as if alienating potential audience members is a bad fucking idea!
So, from a business standpoint, CNN moving closer to the middle is fiscally responsible. Whether people still see it as a viable news source is yet to be seen. And judging from Leftist reactions to even the slightest move to the right of Trotsky, it didn’t go over well.
This is for a couple of reasons. First, Leftists suck at basic economics. Second, they tend to look at things through an emotional lens (which helps explain the first point). And third, Leftists hate anything that removes even an iota of power from their grasp or exposes their ideology to ridicule.
Enter President Tamland’s debate performance, which is less of a disaster than a Hindenburg movie by Michael Bay written by Tommy Wiseau. Although I would pay good money for Wiseau to make a cameo just to say “Oh hi-drogen!”
You can stop booing now.
Since Leftists are less capable of admitting a mistake than The Fonz, immediately CNN became the primary reason President Tamland looks like, well, himself. Of course, the real reason Leftists attacked CNN for Tamland’s disaster is not that they went out of their way to make him look bad, but that…they noticed he looked bad and didn’t come to his defense. They tried to do some damage control after the debate by fact-checking Trump and Tamland, but the damage was done. Tamland looked frail, confused, and without mental clarity. But at least we beat Medicare, amirite?
And after weeks and weeks of denying it, CNN among others had to admit President Tamland was not firing on all cylinders. Or maybe on any cylinders, for that matter. No more “cheap fakes.” No more deep fakes. No more right wing talking points. The Emperor had no clothes, but maybe had on adult diapers.
I have my issues (or subscriptions as the case may be) with CNN, but I have to defend them here. They didn’t cause President Tamland to look bad, and that’s even with all the preparations he did prior to the debate (including going to the debate stage). He’s just that bad of a candidate this time around, and no about of finger-pointing is going to change that.
So, to any Leftists reading this, lay off CNN. It’s not their fault your side decided to run a Strom Thurmond body double in 2024. You had your chance to pick someone else, even with the knowledge he was getting as sharp as a Nerf ball on the regular. It’s your fuck-up, so enjoy the ride.
And as for CNN, welcome to what conservatives and other non-Leftists have experienced for decades! Don’t worry. We have drinks, snacks, and more open-minded people than the Left. And what’s more, we validate parking!