The Morning Briefing: Joe Biden's Debate Tune-Up Is Alternately Pathetic and Hilarious

Top O' the Briefing

Happy Tuesday, dear Kruiser Morning Briefing friends. Elszencia felt her raspberry crumble was finally ready for Nibbler's Row at the Tri-Village Biennial Flea Market.

On Monday's episode of "Five O'Clock Somewhere," my friend Stephen Green and I discussed that neither of us is completely convinced that the first 2024 debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden will happen, even though it's only days away. As we have discussed many times, nothing should ever be ruled out in this most insane of election years. If it does happen as scheduled, Stephen will do one of his legendary live VodkaPundit Drunkblogs.

Matt wrote a VIP post yesterday wondering whether the Biden campaign might be trying to goad Trump into backing out. That would obviously be the best-case scenario for Biden and his handlers. They no doubt wish to reprise the Basement Strategy from 2020, but that is a lot more difficult to pull off without the pandemic as an excuse.

The Trump people know that this debate setup is ridiculous. This is from another post of Matt's yesterday:

One of the biggest challenges Donald Trump will have to face in his upcoming debate with Joe Biden on CNN on Thursday — assuming Biden shows up — won't be handling the president but having Jake Tapper and Dana Bash as the moderators.
Tapper and Bash are about as anti-Trump as you get, and when Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt appeared on CNN Monday to discuss the upcoming debate and happened to mention their bias, anchor Kasie Hunt had an absolute tantrum on the air.
When Leavitt pointed out that Trump was preparing to "go into a hostile environment on this very network with debate moderators who have made their opinions about him very well known over the past eight years," Hunt insisted that both Tapper and Bash were "professional."

My opinion of Tapper is well-known, and Dana Bash is equally awful. As I wrote last week, I can't for the life of me figure out why Trump and his team agreed to give CNN a desperately needed injection of ratings that the network's hacks can't get on their own. Maybe Trump's people are experiencing some buyer's remorse.

There is almost no upside for Trump in this debate. The bar for Biden's success will be so low that his cheerleaders in the mainstream media will have little problem creating a fictional version of whatever happens on Thursday night. That is when the "cheap fakes" that Karine Jean-Pierre has been complaining about will appear; it's Biden's people who will be creating them, however.

Everything about this debate has been set up to accommodate Biden. I'm surprised they didn't push to make it a Zoom call.

Speaking of that low bar, my friend and colleague Matt Vespa wrote about Biden's debate prep over at Townhall yesterday:

No wonder why the Biden team departed so early to Camp David for debate preparation. The White House summoned all the top Democratic strategists and advisers to ready the president as best they could against former President Donald Trump. Before they could review any of their attack lines or soundbites touting this administration's little legislative record, they need to ensure Biden can stand for at least 90 minutes.

That's right: he's practicing standing up.

Admittedly, I chuckled when I first read that. Later, when I brought it up on "Five O'Clock Somewhere," I couldn't stop laughing about it. At some point, that's all one can do amid this madness.

Reiterating what I wrote last week, I'm not sure that Team Biden will be able to pull off a repeat performance of the State of the Union address. That was almost four months ago, and President LOLEightyonemillion was reading a scripted speech from a teleprompter then. There is also the fact that the pace of both his mental and physical decline has greatly accelerated in recent months.

Which is why they're trying to make sure that he can stand at a podium. I guess the litmus test will be that if he makes it through the entire debate and doesn't collapse, huzzahs will echo all around the MSM and we will be repeatedly assured that the old boy is ready to go.

We will then spend the rest of the summer reading about a sudden, unexpected nationwide Adderall shortage.

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