Can Dowdy Pants Refresh a Withered Orange?

So I said to myself, "Self, this e-mail mess has to be dealt with; it is getting ridiculous," and I held my nose and dived into the e-mail. When half of it was filed or deleted I said to a friend, "Friend, I could use a reward," so we went into town and watched the presidential debate.

Well, someone had really been working with Dowdypants. 

I started to type "old" Dowdypants, because her perpetual procession of fashion blunders is so old. The britches are probably new but they look old. I can't call her that, though. I am too close to her age to describe Dowdypants as either old or young. That's not a bad thing to have to face up to. She looked good on television, probably the best she ever has looked or ever will. Black jacket, white shirt, keep the dreaded sweat-trap trousers behind that lectern: that's the fashion rule that will probably always work for her. We knew it was probably some combination of badly fitted trousers and sex-toy shoes, but at least we didn't have to look at it. Or, since there was no audience, smell it.

What is harder to deal with is the fact that her vice-presidential candidate and support dog, who looks as if he might be her father, was born in the same year she was. Now I would have more than a dozen white hairs, if they didn't keep falling out during glyphosate reactions, and so would Dowdypants, if she didn't dye her hair to add blondish highlights...but men our age have no excuse for looking like that geezer.

I still think that, if there were no other reason to vote against Dowdypants, the dowdy pants would be an important one. If elected she'd probably start a fad for wearing sweat-trap trousers with hooker-heel shoes, and then where would we be? No thinking woman would vote for such a thing. Serious women candidates will wear shoes that are shaped like a human foot, and skirts that make it hard to tell which of the women in a group is wearing a pistol in a garter holster. Skirts also show consideration for other people on the commuter train who may be trying to breathe. But Dowdypants can probably afford a fresh new pair of sweat traps every hour, anyway, and the top of her outfit did suit her.

Then she opened her mouth. 

The questions she'd agreed to answer in public were not softballs; they were cotton balls. Did I ever have questions for her. A blog seems like the best place for these questions even if they have to be scheduled a few days after the debate.

Q. "Vice-President Harris, do you believe Americans are better off than they were four years ago?"

H (grinning and waffling frantically): "I grew up in a middle-class family...I intend on extending a tax cut for young families..."

Question that should have followed, but didn't: "And in view of all the damage that's been done to formerly established mid-sized businesses, where exactly do you plan to make up the money for this tax break to reward lack of sexual self-control?"

H. "...and for start-up small businesses. "

QTSHFBD: ""What about the established businesses? What about the Family Dollar stores, the neighborhood convenience stores, the family-owned restaurants, family-owned hardware stores, bookstores, crafts stores....? What about the people who are being asked to start up small businesses at our age when they've already spent forty years building the businesses your administration detroyed?"

H. "...and my opponent wants to raise the sales tax!"

The Orange Thing looked more withered than he did eight years ago. Less orange, more grey. We all know what happens when an orange turns grey. But even Trump should not be blamed for looking old while standing beside a bright young thing of sixty. For a White man who's closer to eighty than seventy, he did not look bad. Much better preserved than barely-sixty-year-old Walz.

T. "First of all I have no sales tax. That's an incorrect statement. She knows that. What we're doing is tariffs..."

QTSHFBD: "Is either of you candidates in the habit of buying American? Not that it's possible at any of these big-chain stores any more, but have you ever tried? Obviously Harris hasn't; that would explain her confusion about the difference between a tariff and a tax. But how do you plan to explain this to some thirty-year-old working father who doesn't even go into stores that still have anything that's not made in China? Won't the tariff hit him like a tax, too?"

T. "...and immigrants, those awful horrible terrible immigrants..."

QTSHFBD: "Will you kindly hire a psychologist to talk about this business of expecting all immigrants to be like your grandfather?! Immigration is obviously contributing to the congestion in our cities, which was already unsustainable. Immigration needs to be curbed. There's no need to make a noise like a hater about it. Just say, right, we have a limited number of spaces for people whose homes have been destroyed by natural disasters, but even war--we can't afford to bring in very many more immigrants who have lost their homes to war. Youall are going to have to start settling your disagreements like adults."

Q. "Let Vice-President Harris respond on the economy."

QTSHFBD: "President Trump having totally wasted his chance to talk about the economy, which is his strongest point. He knows that. Why?"

H. "Trump left us the economy...Trump let us the pandemic..."

QTSHFBD: "Did it occur to you that limiting quarantines and lockdowns to Trump's schedule would have done a lot less damage to the economy? Are you in biological fact a weasel?"

H. "...What we have done is clean up Trump's mess."

QTSHFBD: "Hello? I was awake during these past four years, and I can hardly wait to see how long it takes Trump or just about anyone else to clean up YOURall's mess."

H. "...In this debate tonight, you're going to hear from the same old, tired playbook, a bunch of lies, grievances and name-calling."

QTSHFBD: "Why don't you just stop now?"

H. "...And I pledge to you to be a president for all Americans."

QTSHFBD: "This is where we see your lying skills. You'd be a puppet for the would-be world rulers at the UN. Let's test your lying stamina. Tell us what the sovereignty of these United States means to you!"

T. "Everybody knows what I'm going to do. Cut taxes very substantially. And create a great economy like I did before."

QTSHFBD: "You didn't get us out of debt. You didn't restore an economic situation where anyone who wants money can go out an earn some. You did much less badly than Biden, but then again every presidential administration we've had since 1940 has done that, so watch the hyperbole."

H. "Goldman Sachs said Trump's plan would make the economy worse. Mine would strengthen the economy."

QTSHFBD: "I thought you were talking about the American people. What's good for Goldman Sachs is not necessarily what's good for the American people."

H. "Trump actually has no plan."

T. "She doesn't have a plan!"

QTSHFBD: "Can we put the inner toddlers in time-out, please? Vice-President Harris, are you aware of what your face is doing? You are smirking. In another minute you'll be sneering. You could be in a movie--a horror movie. Can you keep your lips together over your teeth when you're not actually saying words with E sounds in them? You look so much less bad when every single tooth in your head is not sticking out."

Q. "Do you believe Americans can afford higher prices because of tariffs?"

QTSHFBD: "Does your plan include licensing individual Americans who can't afford the tariffs to start building tariff-free domestic goods? Are we talking about, Joe Sixpack can't afford to wear shoes with little foreign flags on them, so he starts making his own shoes? His kids can't afford to buy all the junk associated with idiotic Japanese video games, so they build their own game boards and play chess?"

T. "They aren't going to have higher prices. Who's going to have higher prices is China."

QTSHFBD: "Specifically how do you see that happening and how does it keep the Chinese Communist Party, with their incredibly retrograde thought process, from starting another Cold War or maybe even a hot one?"

H. "The Trump administration resulted in a deficit...but let's talk about COVID!"

QTSHFBD: "Would you like to stop and thank Trump for actually having COVID so that there could be a Biden administration? Would you like to talk about how you and Biden basically bought votes by claiming the credit for what had actually been Trump's idea?!"

T. "She has no policy. Everything that she believed three years ago and four years ago is out the window. She's going to my philosophy now. In fact, I was going to send her a MAGA hat...But if she ever got elected, she'd change it. And it will be the end of our country. She's a Marxist. Everybody knows she's a Marxist. Her father's a Marxist professor in economics. And he taught her well. But when you look at what she's done to our country and when you look at these millions and millions of people that are pouring into our country..."

QTSHFBD: "Will you leave your grandfather out of this? And by the way, what about a shout to Richard Nixon, whose plan for curbing inflation she's trying to borrow? It made sense to me and my whole Girl Scout troop, too, at the time. But it did not exactly work."

T. "...Immigration is the worst thing that can happen..."

QTSHFBD: "Do you even notice that verbalizing all these issues around your grandfather is making you sound like a racist when you're not even acting like one? Can you give it a flippin' rest?"

Q. "President Trump, Vice-President Harris says that women shouldn't trust you because you've changed your position [on abortion]...why should they trust you?"

QTSHFBD: "Can we start with the fact that a majority of women think that having abortions is not liberated, that not starting unwanted babies is liberated?"

T. "They [Democrats] have abortion in the ninth month...even after the baby is born. \...But what I did is...get Roe v. Wade back into the States."

QTSHFBD: "With how much collusion from Ds who were willing to sacrifice their 'right' to do their women wrong if it'd get that idea of a right to privacy out of the language? What are you planning to do to get privacy enumerated as a constitutional right?"

H. "Now in over twenty states there are bans which make it illegal for a doctor or nurse to provide health care!////[Presumably she meant abortion.]  I think the American people believe that certain freedoms, in particular the freedom to make decisions about one's own body, should not be made by the government."

QTSHFBD: "What price those vaccine mandates, weasel?!"

T. "I'm not in favor of an abortion ban, but now it doesn't matter because this issue has now been taken over by the States."

Q. "J.D. Vance said you would veto [restoring Roe v. Wade] if it ever came to your desk."

T. "We don't have to discuss it because she'd never be able to get it just like she was unable to get student loans!" 

Presumably meaning student loan payment cancellation. At this point both candidates' blood pressure was up and their remarks sounded unscripted. In this case "unscripted" is a polite way of saying "incoherent."

QTSHFBD: "Sir, you cannot help having a round face or a ruddy complexion, but having those two things, you cannot afford to let your face pucker up like a baby's when it's about to howl. Can you try to get control of this?"

Q. "Would you support any restrictions on a woman's right to abortion?"

QTSHFBD: "Have you drawn a clear line between making love and making babies for yourself? Have you taught it to your children?"

H. "I would reinstate Roe v. Wade. Under Trump';s abortion ban, couples...are being denied IVF [in vitro fertilization] treatments."

T. "Another lie. I have been a leader on IVF."

QTSHFBD: "In this crowded world? Shame! Why not adoption?"

Q. "Why did the Biden administration wait until six months before the election to act [on restrictions on immigration]? Would you have done anything differently?"

H. "I supported...[a bill] which would have put 1500 more border agents on the border."

QTSHFBD: "That's your answer--spend more tax money? From whom is all this tax money to come?"

H. "And people leave Trump rallies early because of exhaustion and boredom."

QTSHFBD: "People leave all kinds of events early because they get up early in the morning. This has what to do with the question of whether, apart from findng the money to pay 1500 more border agents, you would have tried things like simply telling these people that there's no more room for them?"

Q. "President Trump, why didn't you support the bill?"

T. "I want to talk about her rallies. People don't leave my rallies. People don't go to her rallies!"

QTSHFBD: "Can we have another time-out for the inner toddlers?"

T. "And in Springfield, they're eating the dogs...they're eating the cats..."

QTSHFBD: "Haven't you heard that that rumor was supposedly disproved? Not that you can prove a negative. Not that it's not possible that somebody, somewhere, has eaten someone's straying pet. It's happened before. But it's not being reported as a large-scale occurrence."

T. "If she becomes Presidetnt...we'll end up being Venezuela on steroids."

QTSHFBD: "That's entirely possible. If we don't head the warning of what happened when Venezuela elected a Socialist, we could easily allow someone like Harris to add to our existing pile of toxic socialist schemes the last one that will bring the whole economy down. But what's it have to do with the question? Can you try to remember that everyone on Earth has not formed the mental habit of leaping from the thought of immigration to the thought of the apocalypse?"

H. "This is, I think, why I have the endorsement of 200 Republicans."

QTSHFBD: "We all know a lot of people don't like Trump. Isn't it more germane to the issue that the masses of moderate Ds who would have backed Kennedy, not to mention the I's and Rs who do back Kennedy, are not described as "Never-Harrisers"? We don't hate you, personally, Vice-President. We just think your policies are unworkable, the ideas you do talk about are unsustainable, the ideas you've been trying to avoid even letting other people talk about are more important than the things you waste our time talking about (such as abortion), even the fashion trend you'd set is an abomination, and generally you're unfit for the White House and should go home and learn to play shuffleboard. What do you say to the more than 200, I wouldn't be surprised if it were 200,000, Democrats who think that way about you?"

T. "When somebody does a bad job, I fire them. With me they can write books. With nobody else can they...But I got more votes than any Republican President in history."

QTSHFBD: "Do you remember the three-foot shelf of books the Clinton staff wrote? Anyway there are more voters than at any previous time in history. There are too many humans on Earth. That's the source of many of our problems. Can you consider not taking credit for it?"

Q. "How would you deport eleven million immigrants?"

T. "We have a new form of crime! It's called migrant crime! It's happening at levels that nobody thought possible!"

QTSHFBD: "Funnily enough, all the crime the newspapers have reported lately--when they send anyone out to report anything, when they don't just sit around blethering about COVID--fits the pattern of 'Prozac Dementia'. If reelected, President Trump, will you redirect the national conversation away from unconstitutional gun bans that actually serve to sell more firearms to people who probably shouldn't use them, toward a consideration of which drugs all these violent criminals and especially the homicide-suicides are on? What will you do about guaranteeing closer supervision for people who choose to use prescription drugs that are well known to cause homicide-suicide thinking? Do you think survivors of these incidents should own Lilly?"

H. "Well, I think this is so rich, coming from someone who had been prosecuted for..." [nonviolent, white-collar crimes, all charges except the past adultery being purely political in nature]. So what are you going to do about the housing crisis?"

QTSHFBD: "What indeed? What about helping the people who lost their homes due to the COVID panic to recover their homes? What kind of pay cut is either of you candidates taking by way of an apology to the people who've lost their jobs and homes because of a deliberately whipped-up panic over a rather mild chest cold?!" 

T. "But I'm winning most of those cases" (those white-collar crimes) "and I'll win the others on appeal. It's called weaponization..."

QTSHFBD: "It's called trumped-up charges. It was tacky when all those white-collar 'criminal' charges against President Nixon were trumped up, too. Do you find it ironic, Trump, that a strategy that was probably suggested by your name is distracting so much attention from things you've done that actually cause people whose relatives you have not fired to dislike you, that these so-called criminal charges are actually generating sympathy for you? Is it possible that this junior-grade prosecuting attorney's attitude is making you look good? Can dowdy pants refresh a withered orange?"

H. "The Supreme Court recently ruled that the former president would essentially be immune from any misconduct [charges[ if he were to enter the White House again...he's said he would 'weaponize' the Department of Justice..."

QTSHFBD: "Yes. It'll be payback time. Does that idea scare you?"

T. "I probably took a bullet to the head because of the things they say about me.

QTSHFBD: "Yes, Vice-President? Your administration wants to censor all kinds of legitimate discourse that you fear may promote ill will between subgroups of people, or, more realistically, hurt sales of profitable products such as the clot-shots. You understand, I'm not opposed to people taking vaccines if they think that's the best choice for them, but once you start censoring accurate reportage of the not at all surprising fact that experimental vaccines have not worked for everyone, you're spitting on the Constitution and, as far as I'm concerned, you should move to China now. But since youall think censorship is such a great idea, what about censoring the kind of offensive talk that led to the hatecrime against President Trump? Let's see fines on any newspaper that repeats the tired old lie about the currently living generation of Republicans being racists. Let's see shadowbans for anyone who suggests that Trump's or W Bush's policies were 'extreme.' 'Extreme' applies to Lyndon LaRouche and various other self-nominated candidates whose campaigns the news media have never taken seriously. Riiight?"

Q. "Vice President Harris, in your last run for president you said you wanted to ban fracking. Now you don't. You wanted mandatory government buyback programs for assault weapons. Now your campaign says you don't. You supported decriminalizing border crossings. Now you're taking a harder line. I know you say that your values have not changed. So then why have so many of your policy positions changed?"

H. "My values have not changed!...I will not ban fracking."

QTSHFBD: "So you're comfortable with the idea of Washington washing out to sea? The Appalachian Mountains have been more stable than the West Coast recently, but they were formed by seismic upheavals too. We have fault lines too. You tamper with our bedrock and our artesian springs, you don't know what you're doing to the East Coast. I don't want to do it. We have a housing crisis on the East Coast already. It'll be worse if the coastal cities are under water."

H. "We are going to work with the private sector and home builders to increase three million homes."

QTSHFBD: "And where are all those houses going to be? Don't insult people by calling apartment blocks homes! What about simply helping people reclaim the homes from which they were evicted because they lost their jobs in the COVID panic?"

T. "She was big on 'defund the police'..."

H. "That's not true!" (her microphone was turned off, but the camera picked it up)

T. "I'm talking now. If you don't mind. Please. Does that sound familiar?"

H. "Don't lie!"

QTSHFBD: "The statement that it was his turn to talk was not a lie. We could all see that you were angry that Trump found a chance to use some phrases you had intended to use, first. You were angry that you were the one who'd been goaded into talking out of turn. Were you thinking in terms of 'lies' because it's a lie to say that you weren't angry?

T. "Criminals that killed people, that burned down Minneapolis, she went out and raised money to get them out of jail."

QTSHFBD: "Did you see BLM as only a group of political allies, or did you understand that most Americans see them as rioters and violent criminals?"

T. "I got the oil business going like nobody has ever done before."

QTSHFBD: "Does the name 'Eisenhower' ring a bell?"

Q. "Mr. President, on January 6th you told your supporters to march to the Capitol. You said you would be right there with them. The country and the world saw what played out at the Capitol that day. The officers coming under attack. Aides in the West Wing say you watched it unfold on television off the Oval Office. You did send out tweets, but it was more than two hours before you sent out that video message telling your supporters to go home. Is there anything you regret about what you did on that day?"

QTSHFBD: "Like having failed to bring Twitter's unethical use of censorship to the nation's attention sooner? Well, fear it not, we've all seen how censorship promotes violence. Why, Candidate Trump, have you not made the fact that censorship directly caused that violence, on that day, a major issue in this election? Why are you failing to call out the Party of Censorship as the un-American, crime-promoting, moral evil that it is?"

T. (Paraphrased) "Blame the immigrants, blame the immigrants, it's all about those awful immigrants!"

QTSHFBD: "When it comes to a real threat to our democratic republic like censorship, does anyone really give a daam about the wretched immigrants?"

T. "Ask her that question. They took over a big percentage of the city of Seattle. When are they going to be prosecuted?"

QTSHFBD: "Are you waffling because you intend to be soft on censorship as long as it's being done by your party?"

Q. "Is there anything you regret about that day?"

T. "I said, you know, this is going to be a very big rally...I wasn't responsible for security. Nancy Pelosi was responsible. She didn't do her job."

QTSHFBD: "Considering what the rioters were threatening to do to the Senator, I'd say she's been punished for what was really a totally white-collar crime on both sides apart, of course, from the woman the policeman mistakenly shot. But I think the question has to do with whether you feel any remorse for the way people who were not violent are being used as scapegoats and substitutes for those who were violent, actually. Do you? And don't try blaming the Senator--we can rake her over the coals some other time."

H. "I was there! And on that day the President of the United States incited a violent mob to..." (I can't pinpoint the source but I know I've heard every word of her rant from someone else, before.)

QTSHFBD: "Has anyone ever called you out on plagiarism?"

T (referring to an old news story referenced in H's rant) "That story has been debunked...but..." (paraphrased) "let's make it about immigrants, those awful immigrants. Why doesn't Harris seal the border now?"

QTSHFBD: "Badly as the nation needs to stop the immigration, President Trump, are you aware of any other things we need to stop?"

Q. "You repeatedly falsely claimed that you won the election (i n 2020) by a landslide. In the past couple of weeks...you have said, quote, that you lost by a whisker...Are you now acknowledging that you lost in 2020?"

T. "I said that sarcastically...I got almost 75 million votes."

QTSHFBD: "But you do understand that, even if your 75 million votes were all 100% legitimate and most of Biden's 80 million were fraudulent, which is possible with the electronic voting machines, you still lost the electoral college?"

T. "The problem that we have right now is...they have put (the nation) into decline."

Q. "Trump has said, 'When I win, the people who cheated will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the last, which includes long prison sentences.' One of your campaign's top lawyers responded saying, 'We won't let Trump intimidate us'...Is that what you believe he's trying to do?"

QTSHFBD: "It's called payback time. How badly does that thought scare you? How much do you have to hide?"

H. "World leaders are laughing at Donald Trump."

QTSHFBD. "The people you call world leaders are very duplicitous. Why do you think they're not laughing at you, for being so easy for them to lead into such foolish acts, and saying they're laughing at Trump?"

T. "Vktor Orban said...you need Trump back as president...but this weak pathetic man that you saw at a debate a few weeks ago...got fourteen million votes. She got no votes...and he can't stand her."

Q. "How would you..." (resolve the current war in the Middle East)?

H. (Recites a speech that I happen to recognize, thanks to Michael Moore having shared it recently, as a word-for-word quote from one of Jon Stewart's so-called comedy speeches. No, it wasn't funny when Stewart said it, either.) "We must have a two-state solution where the Palestinians can have...the dignity they so rightly deserve."

QTSHFBD: "The Palestinians are rapists and terrorists and baby killers. The Palestinians are also Semites, and in the ancient lore of their culture we read that what they think deserves to happen to rapists is for all the men in the rapist's tribe to be killed. Who are you to think you can improve on their own traditional solution? What gives you the idea that any Palestinian now deserves anything that might be described as 'dignity'? They deserve shame. They deserve to be lined up, the widows and orphans, the disabled, the ones who did not participate and could not have participated in the terrorist act the whole world saw, and be allowed to choose to defile their men's bodies and beg for the privilege of living in tents and caves and going out to beg for day labor. They deserve to beg to eat scraps out of Israel's garbage. If any arrangement that seems more humane than that is acceptable to the Israelis it would have to be called grace, the spirit of Jesus moving among them, rather than anything the Palestinians deserve! What is wrong with a woman who suggests that any rapist deserves to live, or even to be killed humanely?"

QTSHFBD: "By the way, Vice-President Harris, there's nothing really wrong with paying professional writers to write your speeches, but how much did you pay Jon Stewartn for that one? What about the other speeches you've recited tonight? Who wrote them, and how much did you pay?"

Q. "President Trump, how would you..."

T. "She hates Israel. At the same time, she hates Arabs."

QTSHFBD: "Yes, President Trump, are you aware that that's what being an anti-Semite really means? 

T. (Summarized: The trouble with the Israelis and Palestinians, and likewise with the Russians and Ukrainians, is that they have money to spend on a war.) "...and I'll get that settled. If I'm President-Elect I'll get that settled before I'm President."

Q. "He says that you hate Israel?"

H. "That's not true! Trump is weak and wrong!" (Summarized: The only people who like him are the dictators Americans hate.)

T. "She's weak! And ineffectual!...And Biden..."

Q. "It's time for a commercial break."

QTSHFBD: "Cutting off money to nations that are wasting it on war is a good solution, especially if we have the strength, as a nation, to wean ourselves off dependence on petroleum-fuelled motor vehicles. Does either of you seriously think you're a strong enough or beloved enough leader to do that?""

Mercy. That's just the first half hour of the lies, verbal abuse, and failure even to mention any real issue that the commercial media aren't beating to death. I find myself feeling that I've spent enough time and typed enough words for one day. Youall, if still reading, are probably feeling that you've read enough words on a screen too. I think I'll stop now and let the numbers tell me whether youall want me to reopen the tab with the video of the debate and share my questions for the other two half hours.