I am wracked with guilt over the way I sat transfixed and watched someone die on live television. Ghoulish? Macabre? Insensitive? Yes, I was guilty of all of those things.

In my defence – and I admit it is a weak excuse – it did look as though the person had already died some time ago.

But before you take to social media to flay me alive, I do ask you to consider your own reaction to the end-of-life display by President Joe Biden in his debate with Donald Trump.

And, of course, I am talking figuratively. Biden took to the hustings after the debate in a desperate attempt to prove he was very much alive and planned to remain so after being re-elected. I’m not sure he succeeded.

There is no getting away from the fact that he died a death in front of the cameras in CNN’s Atlanta studios. Even the most ardent Biden supporters had their fingers crossed behind their backs when they said Trump’s falsehoods were more damaging than their own leader’s fumbling missteps.

Media commentators were excoriating in their descriptions of Biden’s performance, and none more so than the Daily Mail’s Richard Littlejohn who drew on an imaginative array of metaphors to describe not only Biden’s performance but also the spectacle of two bizarre opponents slugging it out. Here are a few examples:

Last night’s US Presidential debate in Atlanta, Georgia, made a bar-room brawl in the Bronx between two incontinent old age pensioners look decorous…Biden and Trump reminded me of Statler and Waldorf, the quarrelsome geriatrics from the front row of the balcony on The Muppets…If the President had been a racehorse at Ascot last week, the steward would have put him out of his misery with a single shot to the temple…The post-match quarterbacks on Republican-friendly Fox News were enthusiastically describing last night as a victory for Trump. Which, because of Biden’s cringe-making meltdown, it probably was. But honestly? Trump was kicking a cripple. It was excruciating to watch. Continue reading “Biden cannot rise from the ashes after debate’s funeral rite” →