My Thinking Three Days after the Debate

The day after the debate I got a fundraising text message from Joe Biden. It began: “Folks, I have to tell you this: I have never heard so much malarky in my whole life.”

“Malarkey”? It sounds like he was in a bar listening to a grinning Irishman embellishing on a beloved anecdote. How about, “What you just heard from this man wasn’t an argument in a debate, it was a torrent of deliberate, dangerous, vicious, cynical lies, piled one on top of another, on top of another, on top of another, uttered with selfrughteous conviction, accompanied by sneering , eye-rolling facial expressions, all amounting to a performance that revealed a man whose whole being — whose entire character — consists of demagoguery, blown up demagoguery. Strip it away and there’s nothing to him but greed, desperation, and bombast.”