Rick Rosner, American Television Writer, www.rickrosner.org

Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Independent Journalist, www.in-sightpublishing.com

Rick Rosner: It is four or five days since the debate between Trump and Biden, in which Biden did poorly. He looked old, his sentences were rickety, and he looked slightly out of it. Now, Trump also did poorly because Trump told a ton of lies — according to some counts, more than one a minute. He didn’t answer any question entirely truthfully all night. But Biden’s performance was considered so old-man-ish that there’s been much talk of him leaving the ticket. That’s a bad idea because I don’t think anybody else has as good a chance of beating Trump as Biden. If you look at polls, that’s the case. Maybe it doesn’t mean you couldn’t groom somebody and push them out there to do better. But we’ve only got 18 weeks, enough time for Biden to show that the debate was an aberration.

He had a cold; in older adults, being sick can make you a little loopier than younger people. He made a short speech today about the disastrous Supreme Court decision that granted tremendous immunity to any president, which will be super awful if Trump gets reelected. He only spoke for a few minutes, but he seemed fine. He’s got 18 weeks, and he mostly seems fine. The State of the Union address was less than four months ago, and he was energetic and coherent. The more speaking he does, the more answering questions he does between now and the election; as long as he seems perfectly fine, the more you can make a case for his debate performance being something off — that he was sick or he took cough syrup or some shit. Though if he did take cough syrup, you’d think they would come out with that. So, given that it has been five days and nobody’s fallen on their sword saying that they stupidly gave him Robitussin, it may not happen.

In all this talk, people discuss who would replace him, and you’ve got three governors: Newsom of California, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, and Kathy Hochul of New York, who are getting mentioned a lot. And then, who doesn’t get mentioned a whole lot is Kamala Harris. It’s weird. It’s not entirely odd because her popularity is down there with Biden’s. Her approval, her net approval — the number of people who approve of her minus the number who disapprove — is probably minus 20. 38% approve, 58% don’t. But what’s weird about Kamala Harris is that it is based on nothing because we don’t get any news about Kamala Harris. She has much shit on her plate. She’s been assigned immigration and two or three other significant areas. Plus, when the Senate was tied, she was the Senate tiebreaker. She might still be, depending on how votes turn out. I think she’s broken more ties in the Senate than any other VP in history.

But anyway, she’s got all this stuff on her plate, but there’s never any coverage about her. Her disapproval seems to be based on nothing. The right says she’s evil, but it’s based on bullshit. She’s given a couple of roundabout answers to questions that the right has made fun of and run clips of endlessly, but in four years as VP, I’m sure she’s answered thousands of questions. Two bad replies shouldn’t be enough to tarnish her in the eyes of the electorate. To me, the disapproval has the stink of bullshit. It’s all entangled in the fact that when people say Biden should step down, they should pick one of these governors. Then other people say, well, you can’t do that because you would lose the black vote because there’s a perfectly highly qualified Black-Asian woman in Kamala Harris, and you’re telling her to go away.

But they can’t pick Harris because of her high disapproval numbers, which are entirely mysterious except for the right marshalling its forces to take opinion polls. I’m sure Fox News runs a bunch of stuff portraying her as the devil based on very little. Speaking of tiny, she might be the shortest VP we’ve ever had. She’s only 5’2″. But I don’t think that should be a reason for anything. I don’t get it. She’s law and order almost to an alarming extent. She was the attorney general for California and the DA in San Francisco. She put a ton of people in jail, in prison. People don’t like that because that was back before pot was legal, and she put many people away for marijuana crimes. But really, that’s not a reason to hate her, especially on the right, because they’re supposed to be tough on crime. So, to reiterate, I don’t know why she has such high disapproval, but I think it’s based on nothing.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What about an incident on Twitter where the Kamala Harris account, either her or someone writing for her, wrote, “Donald Trump would ban abortion nationwide.” So, Kamala Harris said, “Donald Trump would ban abortion nationwide. President @JoeBiden and I will do everything in our power to stop him and restore women’s reproductive freedom.” Elon Musk retweets in response, “When will politicians, or at least the intern who runs their account, learn that lying on this platform doesn’t work anymore?”

Rosner: All right, so, the whole thing, Trump, at some point, when pressed on it, in the past few months, somebody asked him, if you became president again, would you impose a national abortion ban? And he said no, he wouldn’t. People thought this was a disingenuous answer. But he was saying that so he wouldn’t lose liberal votes. But he always lies, and people thought he was probably lying about that, too. But anyway, Twitter and Elon Musk gave Kamala Harris’s tweet saying that Trump would ban abortion nationwide, federally, a community note. A community note is when enough people complain about a tweet being factually inaccurate; it gets a community note that contains the correction. The community note for that one said Trump said he would not ban abortion nationwide. Kamala Harris’s supporters said, ‘Fuck you,’ maybe even Kamala Harris tweeted something in addition, saying here are all the clips where Trump says he will ban abortion or stuff that is tantamount to that, like where Trump said that women who get abortions should be punished, which is crazy and awful. Based on their comebacks to the community notes, the community notes went away, and Kamala Harris was vindicated, which I’d never seen happen before on Twitter. I’m glad of it because Trump is often lying, and Kamala Harris didn’t deserve to get called out for calling Trump out.

The end.

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