In which the best and brightest reptile minds cover that debate ...

 

The pond was busy getting fully nuked when the great debate was on and so only had the occasional glimpse, which was an incredible relief.

On the way home, the pond paused only to pick up a kitten and a nice young greyhound - the wokerati have got pose pups everywhere in Newtown - so that the pond could have a hearty Springfield meal (remember when preparing the marinade to add a liberal sprinkling of reptile tears).

The pond wasn't worried, it knew after a good meal of roast chien et chat it could catch the best of the reptile coverage and all would be well. After all, according to a story in The Hill:

Trump polled best with the 65-plus crowd, at 48 percent — the only age group that thought he would make a better president for the next four years.

Exactly. That's the reptile turf, that's the reptile demographic, you can take your cheap Swiftie jibes about cat ladies and shove them, what would they know up against Killer Creighton, the bromancer and the Lynch mob ...

So the pond simply had to rush back from its break to ensure that in the multitude of voices, the reptiles would be represented by their best and brightest minds. Come on down bromancer, set us on the right path ...

A draw? Everybody and his cat and/or dog, and snap post-debate polls had that fiendish cat woman a clear winner, which is why you need the bromancer to balance truth with a proper post-truth reptile perspective. 

The reptiles lathered together a click bait video which showed the bromancer right at the centre of things ...

How could you not trust this man to deliver the good oil, together with a couple more click bait videos, also safely neutered ...

Everybody and his boiled cat and/or roasted dog knows that the bromancer is a not so closet MAGA man, a Trumpian still dreaming the dream ... so naturally he thought that the mango Mussolini was, by his standards, relatively calm and steady.

Some stupid commentators thought that Harris had trolled, teased and baited the Donald relentlessly, but all that's needed is a bromancer take to set things right ...

Unfortunately there were clowns who tried to avoid blaming the obvious - ABC and their team of biased Marxist umps ...

... but the bro wasn't having any of that nonsense ...

Where's the harm in letting the odd stewed cat and/or broiled dog joke, or endless lying, go through to the keeper?

Stupid instant polls, how lucky the reptiles and so the pond to have the benefit of the bro's infinite wisdom. And as for Ukraine, is there really any need to care? When the Donald returns to power, it'll all be over in a trice and Russia will have a new domain ... and don't expect the bro to care ... 

Sure he pretends to care, but he's on board the MAGA train, and for the love of his long absent lord, forget all that Swiftie nonsense ...

Splendid stuff, and incredibly statesmanlike ...

After that, Killer Creighton was surprisingly muted in his letter from America... but didn't the lizard Oz graphics department pull out all stops to produce a splendid montage, why it was just like being there...

Killer was a little troubled by the optics, but did his best to end his first gobbet with talk of Marxists ...

According to some useless commentators, Harris seized the initiative, strode over, grabbed the orange Jesus by the paw, and dominated the space, which in Killer speak is just "awkward.'

There were a couple more snaps along the way ...

... but after making sure the jibe about Marxists was given some fair prominence, Killer seemed to lose heart ...

Oh no, not the old coathanger routine, not that bloody Taliban talk about selfish cat ladies wanting to control their bodies ...

A dispirited Killer meandered and rambled his way through a final gobbet in a way that did the orange Jesus proud, only to end on a most disturbing note...

Poor Killer couldn't even summon up the strength to note the source of the orange Jesus's jibe...

...Moments later, Trump was going after Harris for wanting to “defund the police.” But from the corner of his eye, he noticed she was shaking her head and mouthing the word “no,” and he broke off: “Wait a minute, I’m talking now. If you don’t mind. Please. Does that sound familiar?” True politics sickos like us recognized the reference to Harris’s “I’m speaking” clap-back at Mike Pence in 2020; everybody else was probably just left confused.  (Bulwark)

And oh the shame, to end with a Gav quote ...and instead of sounding like Laura, he ended up sounding like CNN ...

"In the end, we all knew what we knew before, that ABC's goal tonight was to help Kamala Harris, and ABC did help Kamala Harris," Laura Ingraham said on Fox News. That's one way of putting it. Van Jones on CNN found another.
"She whupped him," Jone said. "She just whupped him. ... Kamala Harris did something great for every parent in America. She put the bully in his place." (USA Today)

Or as Michael Steele put it:

Former Republican National Committee Chair Michael Steele said Vice President Kamala Harris “owned that stage” at Tuesday night’s debate as she made the case against Donald Trump.
“She spanked that ass,” he said on MSNBC.
Trump, on the other hand, gave off a very different impression.
“He looked small. He look withered. He looked beaten. But most importantly, he looked pissed,” Steele said. “And there’s nothing worse than a pissed bigot on the stage with a woman he can’t control.”
He said Trump ended up staring at the floor as he sulked and pouted. (Huff Post)

Poor Killer, ending with a Gav quote, and missing the best bit about the orange Jesus having his clock cleaned. 

For a second the pond thought of drumming Killer out of the reptile union, but was placated by another slice of greyhound yearling...

And so to the Lynch mob, who did what all Melburnians do ... blame the ref, or the umpire, if you will  ...

Before getting on to the Lynch mob imitating a boxing judge, best get a click bait video out of the way, and a shot of the orange Jesus in top form, exuding confidence and charisma ...

Hang on another tic, before calculating the score, the pond wants to get rid of more of those cheap, sordid, woke jibes ...

Simply put, Harris went after Trump in all of the places that bug him the most and he lost it. "He took all the bait and none of the opportunities," Dana Perino said on Fox News afterward.

Jake Tapper echoed that assessment and took it further.

"He took the bait almost every time, if not every time," Tapper said. "He cited Fox (News) hosts as fact-checkers, he invoked Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán as a character witness.

"It was like a 4chan post come to life."

4chan!

And then there were those moderators, the bane of the Lynch mob's life...

..this was jaw-dropping TV.

It was from the start, when moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis of ABC News introduced the candidates. They walked out to take their places behind their lecterns and Trump looked as if he had no interest in shaking hands. Harris strolled over to his side of the room and shook his hand, introducing herself (the two famously had never met, since Trump skipped out on the 2021 inauguration).

She controlled the debate from that point forward.

Muir and Davis, not so much. It was a mixed bag for them. Davis finally called out Trump for the oft-repeated lie that some Democrats support abortion after birth. Good on her; it's about time someone did. And after Trump repeated the ugly, racist lie that Haitian immigrants were eating pets in Ohio, Muir pushed back.

Trouble was, Trump pushed back on him, citing things he said he'd seen on TV. The much-debated and agreed-upon rules included muting one candidate's microphone while the other spoke. But many, many times Trump in particular would start talking after Harris answered a question (you could hear his voice) and they turned his microphone back on. In effect, this gave him rebuttal after rebuttal and slowed down the debate.

On the other hand, almost every time this happened, Trump dug himself deeper into a hole of lies and misstatements. As Tapper put it, "Before the debate, Trump supporters expressed hope that the former president would stay focused on issues such as inflation and immigration. That did appear to be a struggle for Donald Trump."

You don't say. He simply could not help himself. The entire debate was an exercise in an inability to control oneself. Harris put Trump on the defensive early on and he proved unable to respond with anything beyond what at this point can fairly be called Trumpisms. For instance, given the opportunity to set the record straight, he doubled down on his false claim that the 2020 election was rigged.

When he talked about President Joe Biden leaving the race, he said, "They threw him out of the campaign like a dog." The way things were going, the only surprise was that he didn't then claim Haitian immigrants ate him.

Say what? Haitian immigrants ate Joe Biden? Spread the news ...

A pity that bloody dog couldn't also eat the Lynch mob's scorecard ...

Really? Yep, really ... to his eternal credit, down there with dishing it out to black tenants ...

Ah memories, nothing like hanging a few troublesome blacks ... they might have been innocent, but it's the principle of the thing ...

And so to the total on the tape ...

Indeed, indeed, trust a prof to explain how useless profs are, how stupid and irrelevant and rambling and discursive they are... who could argue with a prof? 

And as for all that lying, why it's just the way you should do business ...

Daniel Dale, CNN's fact-checker, called many of Trump's lies "untethered from reality."

“I think a lot of Americans say, well, all politicians lie," Dale said. "No major presidential candidate before Donald Trump has ever lied with this kind of frequency.  A remarkably large chunk of what he said tonight was just not true."

And that's how the prof should have scored it, with the orange Jesus mopping the floor with her: Best liar DT 100, feeble liar KH 39 ...

Alternatively the prof could whip up a concept of a plan for a scorecard... after all, a man was seen walking down the street with a goose ...

And now whenever that debate returns to mind, folks can remember it by the incredible strength of the lizard Oz coverage by the best and brightest reptile minds ...

Time to wrap things up with a few celebratory 'toons ...