Sunday, July 28, 2024

i'm going to be moving on, but i want to draw attention to a part of the debate.

do you remember when biden started bragging about his golf game, and trump told him he was full of shit? this was a role reversal - biden sounded a lot like trump all of a sudden, and trump was right to tell him he was lying, because he was.

well, sort of.

an open question over the last ten years has been whether it's accurate to call a trump a liar or not, as lying requires a mens rea component, in addition to the actus reus. that is, you can't accidentally tell a lie; in that case, you're just wrong or misinformed. a lie is a special case of being wrong where you know you're wrong and purposefully say something that isn't true, knowing you're wrong, in order to mislead somebody.

so, was biden lying about his golf game?

i want you to consider the possibility that he wasn't, which i suspect is the actual case, and extrapolate that to the problems inherent to the biden presidency, and which are likely going to manifest themselves in the harris campaign, malignantly. 

what if they told biden his golf game was better than it is?

what if they told him it was improving when it was actually deteriorating?

the reason they would do that is that they would be rewarded for it, as yes-men and yes-women (the yes-people, and i'm not talking about bill bruford), because biden had an ego, and inflating it came with self-interest. you tell the president what he wants to hear, not what is true, because you get promoted for it.

so, will biden ever learn that his golf game isn't what he believes it is? 

it doesn't really matter. 

but harris likely needs to address the issue and eliminate a lot of people if she wants to win and if she wants to govern effectively.