A few years ago there was an article about a Western Union employee whose job was to talk people out of wiring their life savings to scammers. At one point they describe a woman clearly in panic. In one hand she held her own cell phone with the scammer still on the line and insisting that she needed to wire $10,000 “for back taxes” or face immediate arrest. In the other she held the Western Union desk phone where their representative was calmly explaining that this was just a scam, that the person on the other phone was not an IRS agent and police were not on their way to her house to arrest her. “But what do I do?” she asked. His answer was always the same: “Just hang up and walk away.” And then the hapless victim has to decide which universe she believes is reality. Sometimes they take the representative’s advice and sometimes out of fear they wire the money anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I kept flashing back to that story as I was watching last night’s presidential debate<\/a>. In one hand we had Trump spewing a firehose of bald-faced lies, in the other we had a clearly flustered Biden trying to keep up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Trump world Nanci Pelosi is responsible for the January 6th insurrection, for 51 years “everybody<\/a>” has wanted Roe vs. Wade to be overturned, Democrats want to be able to kill babies after birth<\/a>, food costs under Biden have “doubled and tripled and quadrupled<\/a>“, Trump’s claim that there were “good people on both sides” of the alt-right protest in Charlottesville has been “debunked”, his former chief-of-staff<\/a> is lying when he says Trump called veterans who died for their country “suckers and losers”, he never had sex with a porn star, it was Trump and not Biden who capped insulin at $35<\/a>, and it was Biden and not Trump who was rated worst president in history<\/a>. Honestly it was exhausting to listen to all this crap when he was president and I’m annoyed I have to keep listening to it now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here in the real world, Trump has been impeached twice, once for withholding aid to Ukraine to get them to make up dirt on Biden and a second time for instigating a violent attack on the capitol to keep himself in power after losing the 2020 election. He has been convicted of 34 felonies for covering up hush-money payments to a porn star he had sex with while his wife was nursing their first child. He has been found by court of la<\/a>w to have raped (excuse me, “digitally and forcibly penetrated”) Jean Carroll in the mid 1990s and required to pay $88.3 million in damages for subsequent defamation against her. He is responsible for the repeal of Roe v. Wade and the resulting health risks to women now forced to bring a non-viable fetus to term. He has threatened to leave NATO<\/a> and told allies<\/a> that if they didn’t pay their bills he would encourage Russia to do “whatever the hell they want.” And don’t even get me started on Project 2025<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Meanwhile, Biden has accomplished a great deal in his 3.5 years as president (in addition to simply being sane \/ not Trump, which honestly I consider job one). His successful rallying of allies against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was breathtaking to see, the vaccine roll-out was smooth, and the economic plans he pushed through congress have helped the US economy recover<\/a> from the pandemic much faster than the rest of the world. I was even impressed with how smoothly the pull-out from Afghanistan went, despite some chaos in the first few days. His administration has also tackled some issues I’d almost given up on, like pushing back against monopolies<\/a>, increasing funding for IRS audits, allowing Medicare to negotiate with drug companies, and re-instituting net neutrality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n