Two ghastly hours of infantile Obama-bashing and Clinton-cussing; a vile, vertiginous romp through the most exotic of right-wing fantasylands; and the shocking, unspeakable realization that the degenerate Donald Trump is probably the most presidentially capable among the whole squalid bunch.
That was my Thursday night. How was yours?
It was at times unbearable. By 9:15 Eastern I was praying for 11:00 p.m. Eastern. When 11:01 came and they were still at it, I turned it off; I turned off the wrenching spectacle out of a surfeit of wrench. The assault on one's consciousness, the rape of national dignity, the unprecedented degradation of the presidential chase itself — all were almost indescribably brutal.
The only honorable moment came in Trump's eloquent defense — in response to the immeasurably offensive Ted Cruz — of New Yorkers. Otherwise hateful untruths, distortions, slanders and fashionably partisan stupidity gushed from the stage in malevolent torrents.
No, Hillary Clinton is not under FBI investigation; yes, Christie did support the Supreme Court nomination of Sonia Sotomayor; no, presidents don't go to war over poor navigation; yes, astronomical tariffs have been proposed by The Donald; no, the answer to stopping mass shootings is not "simple"; yes, the mere mention of "New York values" will always amuse the tee-heeing rubes; and no the United States is not weak, it still has a monstrous military and a monstrous military budget to prove it.
And Ted, as you and even most non-Ivy League graduates know, it's not the crime, it's the cover-up; which is to say, it not's the Wall Street loan, it's the populist deception. Nonetheless, I wish you and your tee-heeing rubes well. The latter deserve to get your counterfeit brand of populist democracy good and hard, and by God, slithering mensch that you are, you're giving it to them. You hang in there, Ted … you know, just in case The Donald falters.
The spectacle, the abomination, that inexpressible thing and foulest of rhetorical hells I suffered last night was — forgive the redundancy — the lowest point of America's lowest presidential season yet, barring one side of 1860. National realities, global realities, virtually all realities were heaved into the black cauldron of Republican paranoia and other assorted malignities, from which an intolerable stench arises.
Preceding debates were somewhat entertaining in their debutante ways; this one, that one last night, was just sickening.