Who lost the debate? The American people.

Our choices are between the quintessential diversity hire and a cheat, ass, and liar. Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin won't have to raise a finger to defeat us because we are doing it ourselves.

"Oh God, now comes the dreadful truth, and I must speak."

"And I must hear it." Sophocles, Oedipus Rex

I didn’t watch even a second of this week’s presidential candidate debate. I’d rather jab a railroad spike through my kneecap than spend any of my life that I can’t get back giving either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump the time of day, much less my attention for 90 minutes. They are both terrible, though for different reasons.

If these two nimrods, one the quintessential diversity hire and the other a cheat, an ass, and a liar, are the best that we can do, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin won't have to raise as much as a finger to defeat us in the coming years because we are doing a great job of screwing ourselves all by ourselves.

Before I get into my rant groove, I am aware that many readers of Howlin’ are fans of Donald Trump. Every time I say something good about Trump, subscriptions and readership increase. Everytime I say something bad about Trump, people unsubscribe. I wish that this was not so, but it’s not going to knock me off my stride. I call ‘em the way that I see ‘em. I always have and always will. If it’s any consolation, I’m no fan of Harris either. For me, it’s which is the least terrible choice. So if you are going to get offended because I’m about to slag Trump (along with Harris), you might as well go right now with my best wishes and save yourself some stress on those grinding mental gears.

Ha! See what I did there? No guts, no glory. Anyway, for those still reading, there are, in fact, some things over which I am more than willing to defend the former president. You may read about these here, here, and here.

The abridged version is that I think that the lawfare that has been deployed against Trump is a greater threat to democracy than anything that Trump actually did during his time in office. I have consistently stated that the only thing that concerns me in contemporary American politics more than Trump are his enemies. That’s the absolute truth. Among Trump’s enemies are some of the most anti-democratic and oblivious to our founding ideals people there are. And worse, most of these folks seem clueless to the fact that the first and second amendments to our constitution were enacted specifically to protect the rest of us from the likes of them. Twits.

Unfortunately, it gets worse for my friends on the left. I actually agreed with some of Trump’s policies, mostly with regard to immigration, trimming the federal bureaucracy, and especially pushing back on the legacy media and their bullshit. I think that moving most of the BLM to Grand Junction, CO, for instance, was brilliant (let bureaucrats be neighbors with those they regulate). I also liked Trump’s views on NATO. It really is time, after seven decades, that the Europeans stepped up. So I’ll give him credit for some fresh thinking and a few good ideas.

But, to temper that, I spent a lot of time in DC during the Trump years advocating for the 50-state nonprofit that I headed. Despite the fact that there had not been a more favorable alignment of the political stars for our cause in decades, not a lot got done. When I asked our congressional delegation about this, they’d just roll their eyes. The goal was simply to not attract Trump’s attention. Other than his tax cut, Trump wasn't particularly interested in anything that he couldn't accomplish by decree, i.e., signing executive orders or by appointing someone that he liked to get things done. The idea of being involved in the details of crafting legislation was anathema to Trump. He’d much rather play golf. If you distracted him from that, it was potentially your ass in a sling.

So as much as I approved of, for instance, Trump’s SCOTUS picks (which were, in my view, brilliant), I viewed the rest of his presidency as, charitably, a lost opportunity. Trump impulsively and counterproductively picked fights with anyone who didn’t kiss his ring and said bizarre things about foreign leaders that did not make this country safer. The man has the discipline and impulse control of a 5-year-old.

Yes, the deep state is real. Yes, the legacy media mostly sucks. Yes, most of the beltway crowd consists of shameless look-at-me types who’d sell grandma’s kidneys in the black market straight out of the nursing home if it were even a little bit necessary to perpetuate their sorry existence. I get all of that. But Trump was his own worst enemy: undisciplined, impulsive, lazy, in way over his head, and childish in his response to legitimate criticism. Had he possessed the wherewithal, for instance, to get off of Twitter (X) a few months before the last election, he’d be finishing his second term right now. He lost, albeit not by much, to Joe Biden for crying out loud (I made the same observation about Hillary Clinton losing to Trump in 2016).

Then the coup de gras. January 6 was, for me and I suspect many others, a bridge too far. Even with the media’s lies and distortions about what occurred, Trump still egged on something terrible. I’d have quit his cabinet too. It was disgraceful, though completely in line with his obsession concerning personal grievances.

But here we are, four years later, faced with a choice between Trump and someone who is potentially even worse. How? Why? Please make the pain go away.

I heard Bill Maher opine on a recent edition of Real Time with Bill Maher (FWIW, I agree with just about everything that Rich Lowry of National Review said during this interview) that the best thing that could happen for Republicans would be for Trump to lose this election so that the GOP could begin it’s divorce from MAGA. Now I happen to like Bill Maher, even though I do not often agree with him. But I think that this particular analysis ignores the complexity of what has happened in the GOP since the rise of the Tea Party in the 2010s. Maher is a smart individual with a keen eye for current events, but he’s missing some context when it comes to this.

All of that aside, I could say exactly the same for the Democrats, who lost in 2016 and nearly lost in 2020 against the insanely unpopular Trump because of the excesses of the far left. This, though surprising to Democrats, has made their candidates unpalatable to most moderate voters and almost everyone else outside of the progressive bubble. The sooner the Democrats toss their left wing under the bus, the sooner they start winning lots of elections by wide margins.

Don’t hold your breath because that’s not on the immediate horizon. Kamala Harris and the identity politics that she represents (and is responsible for her otherwise inexplicable rise to prominence) are the billboard for everything that is wrong with the Democratic party. And help does not appear to be on the way.

A mere 60 days ago, Harris was widely considered an ironclad insurance policy for a clearly enfeebled Joe Biden by virtue of her vacuous support for unpopular far left policies concerning energy, crime, free speech, and the economy. Her feeble wit, word salad approach to public speaking, and general political incompetence made her a veritable meme factory. Linguists will one day examine Harris’ speeches to determine how so many sentences clearly uttered in the English language could be so completely unintelligible to the majority of English-speaking Americans. Like a Jedi mind trick, it’s a wondrous thing to behold unless you are on the business end of dealing with it.

So there you go. There are only two choices in this election: the word-salad diversity fraud, Claudine Gay on steroids candidate, or the wealthy, arrogant, narcissistic, megalomaniacal candidate. That’s it. I am reminded of one of the most depressing scenes in any modern novel, Nevil Shute’s On the Beach: “This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.”

I’ve already committed to supporting Trump even though I loathe and despise him simply because I think that he’s the lesser threat to our nation. Not by a lot, mind you, but by enough to likely secure my vote. If I vote for Harris, I’m voting for not only her personal idiocy and bullshit policies, but judges, agency heads, and the direction of the federal bureaucracy. At least with Trump, I’m more likely to approve of what I see in regard to all of the above.

Under Trump, Ukraine suffers. Under Harris, Israel suffers. I think that the economy is likely to improve under Trump, and I’m confident that there will be fewer attacks on our foundational values from the podium in the White House briefing room. I think that the federal government under Trump will have a better sense of who should use the ladies room and that men competing in women’s sports isn’t good for women’s sports. I suspect that under Trump, more criminals will be caught and punished and that our borders will be more secure. I suspect that Trump will shitcan much of the green nonsense that has permeated federal policy the past four years.

So it’s close, but decision, Trump. But Jesus palomino! Are we screwed or what?

Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding bicycles and motorcycles, and arranging and playing music. Follow him on Twitter @MartinHackworth, on Facebook at facebook.com/martin.hackworth, and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com.