Joe Biden didn’t need a jug of Mountain Dew when Thursday’s debate got down to brass tacks, as the crucial issue of who the better golfer is between Biden and ex-president Donald Trump took center stage.
“I told you before, I’m happy to play golf if you carry your own bag. Think you can do it?” said Biden, who self-reported his handicap at eight, or six, whichever, doesn’t matter.
Trump, for his part, playing from the Kim Jong Il playbook, had just bragged about acing two cognitive tests – actually, tests meant to screen for dementia, so, not sure what he’s bragging about, other than, you know, he doesn’t have dementia, when he brought up golf.
“I just won two club championships, not even senior, two regular club championships,” Trump said, straight face and all, bringing to mind the staggering 38-under par 34 that the late North Korean dictator once claimed to have shot, in his first-ever round of golf, mind you, complete with five holes-in-one.
Yeah, eye roll.
“To do that, you have to be quite smart, and you have to be able to hit the ball a long way. And I do it. He doesn’t do it. He can’t hit a ball 50 yards. He challenged me to a golf match. He can’t hit a ball 50 yards,” Trump said.
This mine is bigger back-and-forth was a juvenile moment of levity on a night in which the two geezers with strangleholds on the major-party nominations did their best to scare us all straight.
The lowlight – on a night of lowlights – was Biden almost literally freezing while trying to explain his support for tax increases on the wealthy to get the budget back into some sense of balance.
It didn’t go so well for Biden.
“We’d be able to, right, wipe out his debt. We’d be able to help make sure that all those things we need to do – childcare, elder care, making sure that we continue to strengthen our healthcare system, making sure that we’re able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I’ve been able to do with the Covid, excuse me, with dealing with everything we have to do with, look, if … we finally beat Medicare,” Biden said, and if you can follow whatever it was he was trying to get across, you might need to take one of those tests that Trump says he aced.
Trump, demonstrating quite clearly that dementia isn’t an issue for him, pounced at the opening.
“Well, he’s right. He did beat Medicare. He beat it to death. And he’s destroying Medicare because all of these people are coming in, they’re putting them on Medicare, they’re putting them on Social Security, they’re going to destroy Social Security,” Trump said.
The close second in terms of lowlights for Biden was his answer on abortion access, which the president somehow turned into a self-own on border security.
“Look, there’s so many young women who have been, including a young woman who just was murdered and he, he went to the funeral. The idea that she was murdered by a, by, by an immigrant coming in, and they talk about that, but here’s the deal, there’s a lot of young women who are being raped by their, by their in-laws, by their, by their spouses, brothers and sisters, by just, it’s just, it’s just ridiculous. And they can do nothing about it. And they tried to arrest them when they cross state lines,” Biden said.
To be fair and complete in the reporting, Trump lied – over and over and over and over and …
He didn’t commit to accepting the election results, win or lose, repeated his claim that Democrats want to murder live babies and call it late-term abortion, pulled a Nixon as he touted a secret plan to end the war in Ukraine, which he insisted wouldn’t have happened if he had been re-elected in 2020.
Trump also had to say, on the record, that he didn’t have sex with a porn star, which, hey, Stormy Daniels might agree that what transpired between herself and Trump back in 2006 wasn’t anything resembling actual sex, considering, Trump’s, you know, performance, lack thereof.
These two guys are the best that we’ve got, aside from the third-party guy who said a worm ate part of his brain.
Oceans rise, empires fall, next to Washington, they all look small, indeed.