Rachel Leingang, The Guardian: "[Biden's] low-energy, muted and garbled performance didn’t live up to expectations." 

Exactly whose expectations we are left to guess. Mine would be one, as you might have read in a couple pre-debate posts. I've no disagreement with that verdict — after verdict, after verdict and on to commentariat-infinity verdicts. Perhaps one should say lower energy; sweet Jesus the man is four score and one year old, just six years short of Lincoln's America of four score and seven years.

(Trump won't make it that long, I suspect. Hundreds45 of double cheeseburgers are at this moment conspiring to gather of a sudden inside his teensy-weensy Grinch heart. If not, I'll give them a call.)

Leingang added: Remember "Biden challenged the former president to the debate, which looks like a strategic error in retrospect."

This and other furiously redundant observations have and will continue landing in print and flying above on-air masquerading as original thought. I'm more furious that rare is their is their immediate, additional observation of authentic strategic-or-not Trumpian blunders and more so his carpet-bombing the republic of democracy-annihilating, dictatorship-establishing and economy-devastating plans for a term two — or so. Is all that not far worthier of high-paid opinionating than Biden's low-energy, muted "performance"?      

Melissa DeRosa, Daily Beast: "Longtime Obama adviser David Axelrod [tweeted] nearly seven months ago, 'Only @JoeBiden can make this decision' [to drop out]'. I agreed with Axelrod, but watching the swift reaction of the Democratic establishment in tarring and feathering him as a traitor, I kept my feelings to myself.... I agreed with Axelrod."

She's not ashamed, she is unembarrassed, to write that? A confession that she expresses in ink only that which she's certain will find favorable reception from the Dem establishment and, given that, from her trained, fellow housebroken parrots as well.                    

Aaron Blake, The Washington Post: "Biden came out raspy and with relatively little vigor or inflection in his voice. He stumbled over his words and lines of argument." Blake lamented the mostly absent substance: "Biden struggled to make his points and drive the contrasts."

As noted — Biden's to blame for having to do CNN's job of fact-checking Trump?

Andrew Ross Sorkin, The NY Times: "Democratic donors exchanged panicked texts and emails with one question: What’s Plan B?"

Here, though, is the one must-read entry from Sorkin's DealBook: "Biden’s halting, shaky performance against a confident (if sometimes misleading) showing by Donald Trump has set off alarm among Democrats."

Italics mine, but surely my chortling was shared by untold gazillions across the globe.  

David Chalian, CNN political director, in Editor & Publisher: "The venue of a presidential debate between these two candidates is not the ideal venue for a live fact-checking exercise.”

Yes, and that would be your opinion no doubt, mine too — as well as Jeremy Barr's, WaPo: "[Chalian's words were] borne out during the debate."