Harris-Trump Debate: A View from the Left

+ The title of this column comes from Jean-Paul Sartre’s diary of the first eight months of World War II, when he was stationed in Alsace, working as a meteorologist, watching weather balloons and recording barometric pressure, while waiting for something, anything, profound to happen.

+ So Harris pretty effectively rebutted GOP accusations that she’s a communist, Marxist, socialist, pacifist, progressive, environmentalist, civil libertarian, or humanist.

+ With Harris, it sounds like we will get Cheney’s foreign policy, AIPAC’s Middle East policy, Goldman Sachs’ economic policy, and Exxon’s climate policy.

+ Fires are burning down towns and resorts in California, Texas is running out of water, and a hurricane is bearing down on Louisiana once again. Yet, neither candidate advanced a position on climate change last night that went much beyond drill, drill, drill and frack, frack, frack…

+ Harris is fighting climate change by, checks notes, expanding fracking, boosting oil and gas production and building new factories!

+ Can’t we all now agree that the Democrats are objectively worse than the Republicans on climate change? The Republicans don’t believe in climate change and do nothing about it. The Democrats say they believe in climate change and still do nothing about it.

+ Move along, nothing to see here…

+ Harris’s emphasis on home ownership–instead of the cost of housing—appeals to a generation that no longer exists and is just as nostalgic as any backward-looking fantasy being peddled by Trump. Most young people have no interest in getting a 30-year mortgage. They want an affordable place to live while they spend 30 years paying off their student loans before being buried under medical debt in their 60s.

+ Harris put more distance between herself and Biden than Trump did with JD Vance, but all in the wrong direction, such as trimming Biden’s proposed tax on capital gains from 40% to 28%–an indication that FTC Chair Lina Khan should be putting feelers out for a new job.

+ A week after a school shooting in Georgia and a freeway shooting in Kentucky, Harris answered a question on gun control this way: “Both Tim and I own guns.”

+ This was basically the same Trump we saw against Biden, where the polls showed Trump winning 67-33. This debate’s polls show Harris–who was scripted & robotic–winning by something like 66-34–which shows you what merely being coherent, audible & not having moments of drooling aphasia can do for a candidate…

+ It’s evident that Harris could have won this debate just as decisively without the full spectrum of rightwing positions she’s adopted during the campaign, which suggests she will try to implement them if she’s elected.

+ Listening to Kenneth Branaugh’s terrific reading of Heart of Darkness on my morning walk (in a glorious rain today), I was struck by a Conradian phrase (there are so many memorable ones) that serves as a pretty good description of Trump when exposed: “a papier-mache Mephistopheles.”

+ Hot new MAGA conspiracy: Harris’s earrings were actually earbuds transmitting answers from HRC and Michelle Obama.

+ Hot new MAGA conspiracy 2: Harris’s earrings were a trap to get MAGA activists to speculate that Harris’s earrings were earphones.

+ It’s true that ABC’s moderators fact-checked Trump’s statements three times and let Harris spew falsehoods without correction. To compensate, they allowed Trump to blather on for six minutes more than Harris, though given what he had to say, this probably worked against him. In fact, at the next debate, Trump might want to have his mic muted for the entire 90 minutes.

+ On Thursday morning, the Springfield, Ohio City Hall, which had shot down JD Vance’s racist fantasies about Haitians pet-knapping dogs, cats and geese for food, had to be evacuated after getting a bomb threat. Alexander Cockburn often got terribly incensed about meddlesome “fact checkers,” but never called in a bomb threat to The Nation or LA Times, as far as I know…

+ Haiti will never be forgiven for its revolution, and 220 years later, its people are still being starved, immiserated, invaded, occupied, demeaned, and dehumanized…

+ As the anti-immigrant conspiracy theories inflamed by Trump, Vance and Elon Musk spread, many Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, are keeping their children home and reporting vandalism to their homes and property.

+ Aiden Clark’s father urged these MAGA creeps, led by creepoid-in-chief JD Vance, to stop using his son to further their rancid political views.

+ Race “science” is the only science the rightwing believes in…

+ WTF?

Come over to the window, my little darling
I’d like to try to read your palm
I used to think I was some kind of Gypsy boy
Before I let you take me home
Now it’s so long, Marianne…

+ Aidan Simardone: “Eating cats is not part of Haitian voodoo. The real reason voodoo is demonized is because voodoo rituals were used by Haitian slaves to plan the first-ever successful slave rebellion. White supremacist then made the word ‘voodoo’ synonymous with ‘evil.’”

+ Here’s a bigoted blast from Trump “influencer” Laura Loomer, who flew to Philadelphia with the former President and his entourage. Loomer apparently isn’t a fan of Tikka Masala…

+ I bet Usha Vance can’t wait to share a flight with Loomer…

+ Childless Cat Lady Taylor Swift quickly eclipsed a dull debate by Tweeting out her endorsement of Harris to her 280 million followers.

+ Her Tweet should have come with a trigger warning since it set off deeply buried anxieties, especially among Trump incels and women like Megyn Kelly, who, try as she might, still can’t manage to squirm her way back into Trump’s favor…

+ Meanwhile, Jeanine Pirro on Fox’s The Five told Swift she should shut up and sing…

+ Then there was Elon Musk’s depraved stalker Tweet: “Fine Taylor … you win … I will give you a child and guard your cats with my life.”

+ In his new coffee table book, Save America, Trump includes ten pages of photos with Kim Jong-un, suggests Canada’s Justin Trudeau is Fidel Castro’s secret love child and claims that Mark Zuckerberg will “spend the rest of his life in prison” if he “does anything illegal.”

+ Et tu, Matt?

+ “The GOP will track our menstrual cycles, so we don’t have to.”

+ Sure, Bernie. Dick Cheney believes so firmly in the US’s “democratic foundations” that he helped steal the 2000 election, lied the country into a war and trashed the most basic Constitutional rights for eight years.

+ The Cheney Effect…

+ After the debate, former Attorney General and torture legalizer Alberto Gonzales threw his backing behind Harris, writing in Politico:  “I can’t sit quietly as Donald Trump — perhaps the most serious threat to the rule of law in a generation — eyes a return to the White House.” Too bad Rumsfeld isn’t alive to rejoin the old gang. Perhaps the Harris campaign can Ouija Board an endorsement from him. Does anyone know which Circle of Hell he’s been assigned to?

+ Of course, Obama’s imprimatur is scarcely an upgrade.

+ Not only did Obama indemnify the post-911 criminals of the Bush administration for lying the US into a war and committing heinous crimes against humanity in the process, he actually extended their crimes by using drones in the extra-judicial assassination of American citizens.

+ Harris won the debate. However, there’s little evidence that winning a debate against Trump means much to the electorate. If you read the transcript of the Biden debate, Trump’s answers were filled with lies and nonsense. They received almost no attention. People know he’s a hybrid of a WWE character and the world’s most obnoxious used car salesman & at least 45% of the country doesn’t care.

+ The one thing Harris could have done was use the debate to condemn the killing of Americans (if she can’t bring herself to condemn the killing of Palestinians) by Israeli forces and announce her support for an arms embargo. This is, of course, the one thing she would never risk doing (and didn’t).

+ 40 years of neoliberalism has demonstrated that the answer to our current political crisis certainly isn’t for activists to continue compromising with the likes of Dick Cheney and Jamie Dimon on genocide, police brutality, austerity or the climate crisis. We know what compromising liberals have given us: Serbian war, don’t ask, don’t tell, welfare destruction, NAFTA, Iraq war, torture, Deepwater Horizon, Wall Street bailouts, Libyan war, assassination by drone, Trump, record oil production in the US, and genocide…

+ Chicago Calling…

Jeffrey St. Clair is editor of CounterPunch. His most recent book is An Orgy of Thieves: Neoliberalism and Its Discontents (with Alexander Cockburn). He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net or on Twitter @JeffreyStClair3.