That's entertainment

NOTE: Sorry for being late with this one, folks. My internet connection was spotty most of the day yesterday, until finally it just gave up the ghost altogether at around 6 PM or so, then stayed down until I went to bed in frustration and despair.

After his feeble performance in Thursday’s pre-rigged “debate,” is Too Aulde Jaux Biden done at last? Will the lightbulb finally go on for the D卐M☭CRAT criminal organization masquerading as a political party, inducing them to yank the addled, fading old crook and bring in a late-innings relief pitcher from off their lengthy roster of third-string weenie-arms?

Personally, I don’t think it terribly likely. In my view, it would gain them a lot more to just quietly add an undetectable heart-stopping agent to his morning reanimating-chemical injection just prior to the nominating convention if not weeks beforehand, after which they’ll put on a spectacular pageant of abject national grief the likes of which has never before been seen for the ***”pResident”*** all Americans loved better than their own housepets—indubitably the greatest President in all of US history—a vigorous, competent, admirable public servant taken from us much too soon by a heart attack.

Biden or no Biden, Mark Steyn seems to be dubious about the whole sordid shitshow, with which gimlet-eyed dubiety I wholeheartedly agree.

The Plot Thickens
Well, at least nobody bothered with the usual leaden rituals of American presidential debate.

Was there anyone else on the stage? Not so's you'd know from the headlines. Biden lost to himself. And considering that the object was to make the debate all about Trump that's quite an accomplishment.

So what's going on? Why did whoever's running the show allow this to happen?

I've been of the view, ever since the 2020 primary season, that Biden is the Permanent State's conscious response to Trump: in 2016, Trump was all candidate and no minders; Biden is all minders and no candidate. In that sense, the dead husk of a moth-eaten sock-puppet is the perfect embodiment of American politics. We can do all the cracks about "Obama's third term" or "the Manchurian candidate", but the truth is that, in a supposedly self-governing republic of 350 million people, we have absolutely no idea who's actually running the show - other than the fact that, out of those 350 million, the only one we can definitively rule out of having anything to do with it is the purported head of the executive branch.

You have to figure that that's greatly to the advantage of the Deep State, and that's why they'd like to keep it that way. It's quite something to teach the people the lesson that representative politics is just a meaningless joke, third-rate dinner-theatre in which all the faux-combat is an obvious sham. In the Soviet Union, the point wasn't to persuade you to believe the lie but to force you to live with the lie. Reducing the two-year US election cycle to the same state inflicts an even more brutal humiliation on the masses.

So why weren't they able, after a week-and-a-half of dosage experimentation, to shoot the stiff enough of the juice to pass him off as being back in his State of the Union top-of-the-game mode?

As my former GB News colleague Neil Oliver observed long ago on The Mark Steyn Show, formulating a useful rule of contemporary politics:

This is happening because they want it to happen.

It's important to bear in mind that there is no rational justification for this sudden "panic". The squinting croaking zombie has been out of it for almost his entire "presidency": at the G7 and the like, it's accepted by every other nation that he will play no part in meaningful discussions and attend only one or two of the photo-ops, at which Meloni or Macron will be alerted to steer him back to the podium should he wander off because a comely six-year-old daughter of a deputy-assistant-under-commissioner of EU paper-shuffling has caught his eye.

And what's the net result of all that? Right now the non-dead candidate of the opposition party is one-point-five points ahead in the Real Clear Politics poll of polls - and that's well within the Democrats' margin of fraud when the late-arriving ballots start being motored around in unmarked vans in the early hours of Wednesday morning.

In other words, an amazingly solid core of American voters are either ignorant of or relaxed about the prospect of Second Term at Bernie's. Will this debate seriously shift those numbers?

We come back to some very basic calculations here, starting with the most basic of all:

Is the Democrat-Deep State-Big Tech complex willing to permit a free and fair election that Trump could win?

The answer to that remains: No. They've taken him off state ballots, they've raided his home, they've indicted him, gag-ordered him, convicted him of "crimes" that carry long gaol sentences, threatened to strip him of Secret Service protection, and are preparing to sentence him a couple of days before his party's convention. George S Kaufman observed of the Germans after their invasion of Russia that they were shooting without a script. Not here, not in the essentials: there are four months to go and they will do what's necessary.

The guys running this soap opera know the ending they're working up to, and any unexpected plot twists en route are designed to serve that end.

Indeed so. If there’s anything the last four years ought to have taught us, it’s the essential, incontrovertible truth of Mark’s closing statement. Whether we wish to acknowledge it or not, there’s a lot more going on here than meets the eye.