was there ever really any debate?

tinfoil cat posits and pontificates

expectations for biden in the presidential debate were low, but obviously, what just happened undershot rock bottom and hit some sort of heretofore unexplored sub-basement.

some excerpts for those who missed this watershed of american self-humiliation:

and

it looks like the “silence the mic” feature was no so much to avoid trump heckling, but to allow biden to be saved from himself. where might this have gone next if he had not been cut off?

it’s not as though this was some great secret. videos like or worse than these have been around for years.

obviously, this was meme entrapment

and the internet was not slow to rise to the call

but beneath this something more seismic seems to have occurred: all at once, it was not only OK to notice that joe was more than a few fries short of a happy meal, but vital to do so.

as one the left leaning mediasphere underwent phase change from praising the richness and cut of the emperor’s vestments to pointing and yelling “naked” as loudly as they were able.

goodness! how shocking! what a surprise!

1 week apart…

sigh.

but this raises questions about “what just happened?” and so we bravely don our aluminum armor and wade in finest tinfoil cat fashion into some theories.

1. force the hesitant to answer the call

if i were a conspiracy minded gato, i might posit the following:

the dems know they cannot win with biden. they need to swap him out. but they have no obvious choice. newsom plays too badly nationally and michelle simply does not want it.

those without major name recognition fear the meat-grinder of the current trump surge.

it's political death to pivot from governor to "routed presidential hopeful" and it's awfully late in the day to jump in and get rolling and build sufficient profile.

so what do you do?

you push dementia joe out on stage with a half a dose of meds, let him flounder, and make the pain point so blatant and so acute that you force your bench to step up.

was this debate debacle aimed at america or at the recalcitrant leaders of the dem caucus and the folks they wish to dragoon into service?

will they look to swap out joe or to put a veep behind him who will play the clear heir apparent?

would america be OK with such a clear switcheroo to come and accept a trojan horse election?

are the dems even sufficiently unified to pick a candidate by acclaim or are they too fractured by the left lurching woke wing that keeps doubling down and a center desperate to regain some relevance?

in this scenario, this cycle's swamp donkey convention promises to be one for the ages.

2. salt the fields

it's also possible that the biden machine simply refuses to be derailed by anything, including the utter incapacity of its figurehead and, safe behind the clever veep pick of kamela who is even less desirable and popular than joe, will just keep battering itself to death against the porchlight of power because it has become so hopelessly un-self-aware that it has no idea how bad this is. but i discount this.

this seems a bit of a stretch for whomever the power behind the throne here is. it might apply to joe, but not to valarie jarrrett and BO and other such string pullers. they see clearly.

but perhaps there is a bit more to it as the svengalis would likely rather see trump win than a democrat of a different internal tribe and power base and would prefer a chance to reset and regroup for 2028 as a fresh contest rather than allow another donkey faction to become ascendant and possibly push them out for good.

the dems are not a unified edifice and many view one another as the most dangerous foes on the field. why give another faction a shot as starting to grab the levers of power and lawfare to use against you and run party purges? elect a one term elephant instead and use the time to consolidate your power around a new spokesmoppet. it’s a sound play.

you simply fold this cycle, allow a landslide, then attack trump from the bureaucratic state and judiciary as before while you set up for next time. trump will leave no heir apparent. he does not share power or build others up. you’ll have a clean shot against a new elephant in 4 years and you can keep your party in the meantime.

3. the manchurian family (deep tinfoil. maybe.)

if team biden well and truly is the bought and paid for (and embarrassingly cheaply at that) pawn of foreign influence compensated through shady deals with ukraine and china that somehow cannot sustain any media spotlight whatsoever (itself a telling fact) then perhaps we need to ask the really sinister questions of “is this a real life manchurian candidate and what would such a candidate’s masters want?”

china wants an end to the US as a superpower. they also know they cannot fight us militarily and that their own potemkin economy is tottering toward failure and burial beneath a mountain of debt. they will not attack us directly, they’ll undermine from within pushing a border crisis and bad military entanglement all over the world.

but what they really want is american internal collapse. how do you do that?

you push a candidate surpassingly senile and dishonest and unpopular to the fore and then help him rig an election so blatantly that no one can miss that the fix was in. you want irregularities, box stuffing, machines that suddenly get 300,000 biden votes at once at 3 AM, and exit polls that are 65% trump resulting in vote counts that are 51% biden.

you create an election so obviously fraudulent that america will not accept it and spark civil war or, at the very least, a full de-legitimatization of the US system. you cannot really lose. either your guy gets 4 more years to play the wrecker on a newly demoralized nation, or you spark a constitutional crisis and perhaps internal uprisings. it’s the final denouement of a decades long play to destroy US institutions.

obviously, these are all a bit speculative and the truth may lie in a variety of venn overlaps, but these seem like the key salients running around the board.

i suspect these comments will be one for the ages, so have at it.