John Smyth wrote:
> 'An Anatomy of the Post-Debate Detritus'
>
> <https://victorhanson.com/an-anatomy-of-the-post-debate-detritus/>
>
> 'Victor Davis Hanson
> American Greatness
>
> After the September 10, 2024, presidential debate between Donald Trump
> and Kamala Harris, the Harris campaign became giddy.
>
> And why not?
>
> Pre-debate conventional wisdom had assured the country that underdog
> Harris would shock the nation with her endless wash/rinse/spin word
> salads of repeated phrases and memorized sound bites.
>
> She supposedly would prove as shaky as Trump—the veteran of several
> presidential debates—would prove merciless in eviscerating her.
>
> That did not happen. Post-debate polls of the first 24 hours showed
> clearly that the public felt Harris had won.
>
> Why?
>
> She stuck religiously to her pre-debate prep. It was not difficult to
> anticipate what her tripartite script would be. Joe Biden’s failed
> debate with Trump offered a model, along with the need to avoid Harris’s
> own known linguistic and cognitive liabilities:
>
> One, Harris was told to bait the touchy Trump with smears and slights
> about his failed rallies, his racism, and his shaky businesses. That way
> she could trigger him to lose his cool, go off-topic, rant, and turn off
> viewers.
>
> And he did just that and often. Trump clearly did not prepare detailed
> answers, was not ready to be insulted, and was not reminded to relax—and
> smile, joke, and in Reaganesque fashion sluff off her certain slurs.
>
> Two, she was not supposed to try thinking on her feet, no matter what
> the question asked.
>
> Instead, Harris was always ordered to plug in her prepped and canned
> anecdotes, banalities, and bio-stories regardless of the topic or
> question. And she followed that off-topic boilerplate to spec.
>
> Three, the campaign apparently knew they could rely on the moderators
> for four givens:
>
> they were to fact-check Trump but never Harris. And they did that at
> least five times;
> they were to demand follow-up answers from Trump to make him
> specifically answer the question addressed. And they did that numerous
> times, but not on a single occasion to Harris;
> they were to ask Trump provocative questions to force him to deny that
> he was a racist, an insurrectionist, and an election denialist. But they
> were never to do so with Harris, whose many past outlandish statements,
> prevarications, flip-flops, and padded bio would have given the
> moderators similar rich fodder for cross-examination;
> they would interrupt Trump to get him off tempo, but never Harris.
> The result was that a cool, if not smug, Harris mostly smiled while an
> irate Trump scowled and raged.
>
> Thus, to the millions who watched the slugfest, Harris seemed more
> “presidential” and therefore “won” the debate.
>
> When the size of the huge television audience—some 67 million watched
> the debate—was announced, team Harris naturally assumed her win might
> bounce her even higher than did her initial July surge after the forced
> abdication of President Biden from the ticket.
>
> But then strange post-debate developments followed.
>
> Either a Tiny or No Bounce?
>
> Harris did not receive the anticipated large bounce.
>
> In fact, the polls still remain mostly even. She may have arrested
> Trump’s pre-debate surge a bit, but otherwise, a debate that polled so
> heavily in her favor oddly still seems to have made little difference in
> the still up-for-grabs race.
>
> Stranger still, Harris, the supposedly clear winner, almost immediately
> asked for another debate. Her handlers suggested that this demand
> displayed newfound confidence from her win—as if an assured, second
> knockout debate would ensure her permanent pull away.
>
> But Trump and others countered that it might have instead indicated the
> very opposite: that her pre-debate internal polls had shown the race was
> even or even had Trump leading and thus she still needed a second shot
> at derailing him, given her own team was not sure her single and
> transitory debate favorability would translate into any real lead.
>
> The Debate Reset
>
> Then in a day or two, other and far more significant realities emerged,
> resetting the debate—like a first date’s favorable first impression
> beginning to sour a day later upon further reflection.
>
> As the debate clips were endlessly replayed on television, radio, and
> the blogosphere over the ensuing week, few, if any, favorable Harris
> soundbites popped up.
>
> Harris, remember, was a veritable political unknown who was running a
> stealth campaign of media avoidance and running out the clock.
>
> She had never really answered any questions addressed to her in the
> campaign. And in the debate, she presented her nothingness in confident
> fashion. But she ignored and snubbed both the toadish moderators and
> Trump at every turn.
>
> Yet the public had tuned in only to receive just three answers from her
> that she had never previously offered them since her July anointment:
>
> Why are you flipping—temporarily or permanently?—on almost every issue
> from your past positions?
> If you are the candidate of change, why did you and President Biden as
> incumbents not make these changes the last three years—or at least
> promise now to make them in the next four months of your remaining
> tenures?
> And what exactly will be your policies as president and the details of
> their proposed implementation?
> Every time these questions in the debate were either stumbled upon by
> the moderators or demanded by Trump, Harris evaded by plugging in her
> memorized, smiley, and stonewalling non-answers.
>
> Even leftist media outlets could not find video clips that would show a
> dominant Harris mastering any of these questions.
>
> Furthermore, in the recycled visuals of the campaign, when Trump
> blustered and ranted, viewers now noticed that Harris had deliberately
> turned to him in scripted posturing. She pantomimed as if she were
> prepped by Hollywood actors—not just on memorizing canned trivialities
> but also giving fake moves and poses.
>
> At times, Harris was a Rodin-like “Thinker,” looking contemplative with
> a strutting chin and propping it up with a closed hand. At times, with a
> wink-and-nod, she privately communicated to the audience their
> supposedly shared exasperation at her outrageous opponent. And at times
> she rolled her eyes, batted her eyelids, raised her eyebrows, and
> lip-synched her cynical disdain to 67 million viewers.
>
> The net result?
>
> The longer the debate was discussed, the more the far larger audience
> who had not watched the debate heard about it from friends or saw
> regurgitated media takes, so all the more the public came away thinking
> Harris was certainly slick and smooth, but otherwise empty, shallow, and
> smug.
>
> And the more they saw clips of the scowling, snarling, and raving Trump,
> all the more they heard him blast an unresponsive Harris for the border,
> crime, the economy, and foreign policy—precisely the issues about which
> she was now failing to offer any of studied expertise.
>
> The result was Trump, albeit in sometimes obnoxious fashion, reassured
> the country he could repeat what he did in 2017-21, while Harris
> confidently and professionally offered them little but sugary bios and
> platitudes.
>
> Post Debate Meltdowns
>
> After the debate, a now cocky Harris forgot her directions and thus only
> confirmed her pre-debate no-no’s. So, at a post-debate rally, the
> recidivist Harris reverted to what her handlers had told her was taboo:
> cackling and word salads.
>
> In her first solo media interview in over 50 days with a preselected,
> left-wing local Philadelphia TV anchorman, Brian Taff, Harris actually
> plugged in her exact memorized debate riffs from a few nights
> earlier—even when they had nothing to do with the questions Taff asked.
>
> When Harris realized that she could not answer a single one of his
> questions in the brief 10-minute softball interview, then, in
> deer-in-the-headlights fashion, she simply smiled, hand gestured,
> giggled, and sought refuge in her accustomed platitudes and
> circularities.
>
> The net result was again reminding viewers of her debate inanity a few
> days earlier.
>
> Yes, Harris has a good memory to recite prepped banalities and to bait
> and smear opponents while keeping cool with the help of moderators.
>
> But otherwise, she shows no ability to think or speak on her feet—and
> zero knowledge of the key challenges facing any president.
>
> The Immoderators
>
> It was bad enough that the moderators intervened in the debate—and only
> on one side—to fact-check. But their fact-checks on at least three of
> their five occasions themselves needed to be fact-checked for mistakes,
> especially as the post-debate furor rose.
>
> Moderator Linsey Davis went after Trump for his accurate claim that
> partial-birth abortions and the killing of a baby as it leaves the birth
> canal were legal.
>
> Or as Ms. Fact-Checker arrogantly put it, “There is no state where it is
> legal in this country to kill a baby after it’s born.” That was not
> true.
>
> At least six states make no restrictions of any kind on abortion, and
> thus, admittedly, on rare occasions, infants can be terminated who leave
> the birth canal.
>
> Protection to ensure that such deaths never happen was vetoed by
> Democrats in Congress. Worse still, Harris’s own running mate Tim Walz
> as governor stopped Minnesota state legislation that would have outlawed
> the killing of an infant delivered viable and alive during or after an
> abortion procedure.
>
> The moderators also fact-checked Trump’s assertion that crime was higher
> under Biden Harris than during his tenure and his allegation that many
> large cities do not fully or timely report crime statistics to federal
> tabulators.
>
> Yet Trump was right on both counts. And only days later, the nation was
> reminded of just that when the Biden-Harris Department of Justice
> released recent crime statistics showing crime is still elevated—and
> still quite higher than when Biden-Harris took office.
>
> The post-debate outrage further increased. It was further remembered
> that the two fact-checkers sat mum while Harris spun her own whoppers:
> that no military personnel were posted abroad in combat zones (just ask
> those often attacked in bases in Syria and Iraq, in Africa, or on patrol
> in the Red Sea).
>
> And the two partisans kept silent when Harris repeated the long-ago
> fact-checked lies about Charlotteville, “bloodbath,” Project 2025, and
> Trump’s supposed support for a federal abortion ban.
>
> Journalists after the debate tried to rescue Harris by jumping on Trump
> for other supposed lies, such as alleging Harris had supported
> government-provided transgendered conversion treatments for illegal
> aliens and prisoners. But then, post-debate, Harris’s own prior written
> endorsements for just that appeared.
>
> While Harris’s campaign and liberal influencers were claiming that the
> moderators were not fact-checkers, one of the two, Linsey Davis,
> admitted she was not only a proud fact-checker, but along with her
> co-moderator David Muir had become one.
>
> The reason was because of ABC’s desire to not let Trump supposedly
> promulgate falsehoods as he had in Joe Biden’s disastrous and
> career-ending June debate.
>
> ABC apparently felt the earlier CNN moderators on that occasion were
> seen as too neutral and that being disinterested was a bad thing.
> Instead, in the Muir/Davis warped view, Biden lost that debate not
> because of his visible dementia but supposedly due to Trump’s
> exaggerations (which Biden himself matched if not exceeded).
>
> In other words, Davis inadvertently admitted that after Democratic
> nominee Biden had crashed his career in a debate with Trump, ABC would
> now correct CNN’s supposed laxity in being too disinterested.
>
> So, ABC’s moderators would become actively involved in the debate—and
> did so as the debate postmortem showed in clear partisan fashion.
>
> Translated? One could take the Davis confession to mean the
> Democratic-Media fusion lost one debate by playing by traditional debate
> rules of moderator non-interference—and learned from that loss never to
> be so fair again.
>
> Debate Incest?
>
> The post-debate detritus mounted.
>
> Senior Disney executive Dana Walden—who helps oversee ABC—is known as
> one of Harris’s “extraordinary friends” and, as reported, has been for
> at least 30 years. Their respective husbands have been close pals for
> even longer. Walden has been a steady contributor to Harris’s state and
> federal campaigns for over twenty years.
>
> And it was disclosed that Harris and moderator Davis were national
> sorority sisters, a connection that sounded terrible, but after a fair
> debate, no one would have known what to make of it.
>
> So, in normal times, no one would have noticed these conflicts of
> interest. After all, in the incestuous corporate/politics/media
> ecosystem of the bicoastal left, everyone either went to school, knows,
> does business with and profits from, dates, or is married to everyone
> else.
>
> But given the clear bias of ABC in the post-debate environment, these
> relationships only further tainted the debate’s credibility.
>
> Prairie-fire Madness
>
> As the embarrassments of Harris’s debate and her post-debate evasions
> became better known, the moderators’ bias more fully exposed, the incest
> of ABC aired, and the lack of a debate “victory” bounce acknowledged,
> the irate right-wing blogosphere struck back.
>
> On the rationale that if the left-wing network had “rigged” the debate
> and the moderators tipped the scales, then it too would reply in like
> kind. The result was a barrage of post-debate rumors, conspiracies, and
> false revelations—the discredited fact-checkers be damned.
>
> Within days, fables floated by bloggers and often Trump himself that
> Harris was wearing high-tech receiver-earrings to facilitate stealthy
> prompts and directions from her off-stage handlers. Other rumors spread
> that her calmness was only a symptom that she had been given the debate
> questions in advance, or so an anonymous source claimed. Trump and his
> supporters then insisted that he was widely recognized by the public as
> the “winner” of the debate.
>
> No evidence has yet emerged to prove any of these allegations.
>
> Harris was likely wearing earrings that only remotely looked like a
> brand that doubles as a receiver.
>
> There is no proof, at least yet from ABC or the Harris campaign, that
> Harris, in Donna Brazile/Hillary Clinton/CNN fashion of old, had
> received either the topics or the general outlines of the debate
> questions in advance.
>
> And the polls uniformly really did show that Trump was felt by the
> public to have lost the debate—even though Harris had not really
> profited much from it.
>
> But what was missed by the left’s outrage over the swirling rumors of
> conspiracies was that its own behavior had seeded such hysterias.
>
> When moderators are not just biased but proudly explain why they are
> biased, and when such favoritism does demonstrably warp a presidential
> debate, then those on their receiving end naturally fire back with
> conspiracies of their own.
>
> An interesting question arises over which is worse: the founded and
> proven conspiracy of the moderators in undisclosed but preplanned
> determination to hammer only Trump, or the frenzied reaction to believe
> fables consistent with the demonstrable bias of ABC and its moderators’
> intention to warp the debate?
>
> The Way Not Forward?
>
> What is the result of this debate mess?
>
> No sane conservative will or should ever do another national debate on
> any ABC venue.
>
> If they were wise, Republicans should never agree to any televised
> debate moderated by ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, CNBC, PBS, NPR, or CNN again,
> given the history of liberal moderator bias. The names of Donna Brazile,
> Candy Crowley, David Muir, and Linsey Davis should serve as sufficient
> warnings.
>
> If the presidential candidates still insist on debating their opponents,
> they then should agree only to the classical rules of debating—and with
> only mute timekeepers present instead of loud-mouth,
> egocentricmoderators in the following fashion:
>
> An opening 5-minute statement;
>
> A 3-minute rebuttal of opponent’s similar statement;
>
> A 2-minute rebuttal of the rebuttal;
>
> All to be repeated over eight or nine topics in a 90-minute debate, with
> mouth-shut timekeepers keeping each candidate within his time limits.
>
> So, no more of these televised travesties, even when, as in this case,
> they boomerang on their fixers.
>
>
>
this is not going to get you in bed with her