Picking a column topic isn’t always easy. And sometimes it’s too easy.
Meow.
I hadn’t planned to write about the ABC News debate between “Dr. Demento” and Vice President Kamala Harris. Campaign coverage is an easy piece to write and until about seven minutes into the broadcast, I was leaning toward a serious subject.
All that changed when the former “liar in chief” went astray chasing cats as if someone had pointed a laser dot on the stage and the former president couldn’t help himself from pouncing. It all started with what should have been a boring exchange about an immigration bill that he killed so he could beat up on the Democrats over immigration.
Instead of engaging in a stiff exchange on policy technicalities on the order of the ultra-dull exchange between Nixon and JFK at the first-ever televised debate 64 years ago over the defense of Quemoy (Kinmen) and Matsu in the Taiwan Strait, the dumpster fire was lit when Harris noted his rally goers were bored with his pitch and walking out in the middle of his ramblings.
The response to his you-wouldn’t-believe-how-big rallies being belittled: “In Springfield (Ohio), they’re (Haitian immigrants) eating the dogs. The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating — they’re eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in our country.”
Seriously. Very seriously. And hilarious at the same time unless you’re a legally admitted refugee from the gang terror in Haiti where a drug lord serendipitously named Barbecue is in command and running the place like a never-ending “Red Wedding” episode and spinoff series from “Game of Thrones.”
Democrats who, as a rule, shun the politics of the mentally unfit, can’t post enough satirical food memes about cat-a-lonie, catburger helper, DoorDash deliveries of fresh kitten and an actual wiener dog AI’d into a hot dog bun. Not to be out-memed, Taylor Swift, a “childless cat lady” with 280 million followers, counter-pounced with a picture of her cuddling her cat and endorsing Kamala Harris.
Fox News was keeping tabs (or tabbies) on their boy’s reaction. “She will probably pay a price for that in the marketplace,” Trump predicted, as if Ms. Swift were a Bud Light can that would be crushed by rednecks refusing to look her way.
The first law of holes in debate training is this: when you’re in one, stop digging, put down the shovel and change the subject. But, nooo. The next night our own spray-tanned, marmalade candidate was in Arizona doubling down on the “truth” of his claim: “But the people on television say their dog was eaten by the people that went there.” Seems someone’s been doing his own research. “The people who went there” were legal and not coincidentally, Black immigrants to Springfield, Ohio — meaning the “people on television” undoubtedly worked for Fox News.
Catman had a Plan B for the debate for anyone not distracted by the pet-eating aliens of Ohio — putting an end to post-birth abortions of live children, what most of us and 50 state legislatures think of as infanticide. “In other words, we’ll execute the baby,” he said of a certain Democratic governor’s support of abortion rights.
The displacement of Saturday Night Live skit writers with a former president’s whacky dialogue begs for a sequel but the self-styled champion debater — who “won 98-2” according to his polling — is not up for it. Too bad. The kittycat controversy overshadowed other material that needs further development. His continued insistence that the Jan. 6 insurrection was peaceful; that he really won the 2020 election decisively; and the fake video of his bored rallygoers yawning their way out of arenas are skits that could take on nine lives of their own.
Sadly, this outbreak of dark humor still has a very dark, Swiftian side not seen since the Irish baby lampshade satire. One of my favorite charities, HaitiChildren, doesn’t have time to laugh about the demonized immigrants and orphans that they helped to flee from the drug thugs. And Springfield city officials had to evacuate city hall after a bomb threat from a local resident who was “frustrated with immigration.”
Even the always hilarious Ted Cruz weighed in with a cat meme asking us to vote for Trump so that “Haitian immigrants don’t eat us.”
But all of this demented rambling probably won’t shake up the presidential contest. There is no sign that the Republicans are sending JD Vance to the bullpen to warm up as a replacement candidate. Vance was busy attacking childless cat ladies whom he calls mentally deranged, psychotic and responsible for low birth rates that have “made many elites sociopaths.”
Confronted with a lame debate performance, Joe Biden stepped aside. Given a similarly poor and more malicious performance, the marmalade makeup man insists his Bizzaro Saturday Night Live screenplay is the reality.
We’ll find out in November if what we have known as reality is just a myth to be rewritten as a tragicomedy.