Worst Night for Ohio Dogs Since John Denver

What I see watching the Sept. 10, 2024 presidential debate.

The last time Ohio dogs got so much press was decades ago when singer John Denver rather rudely warbled about how bad his experience in Toledo, Ohio, was, ending his scathing tune with: “And here's to the dogs of Toledo, Ohio/Ladies, we bid you goodbye!”

Ouch. Mean and unfair on many levels. An odd, maybe even weird, insult, given that any town of any size, including Toledo, has a diverse range of women, none of whom deserve to be classified as canines by any shallow man.

And yet, the strange media universe was not yet done with weird men making peculiar mentions of Buckeye bowwows.

I watched the presidential debate Tuesday night. Yikes! What a difference contrasted to the first one. Then, the focus was on how confused and old Joe Biden seemed. To be honest, lost in the reaction to Biden’s poor performance was the fact that Donald Trump spent much of even that night spouting weird nonsense.

Well, how times have changed. In the wake of the first debate, President Biden decided to drop out of the presidential race, and the Democratic Party named Vice President Kamala Harris as its nominee.

And at debate two, delusional Don was back in full force with no slightly older man to hide behind and shield the crazy. Apparently, every country in the world is emptying its mental hospitals and prisons and dumping its criminal or confused people on Uncle Sam. As a result, crime worldwide is down, but dogs in Ohio are worried.

Sound plausible? Really?

ABC fact checked the dog claim—so, so surprising that this story seems to have little basis in the reality most of us inhabit on planet Earth, and yet some weird people, like GOP VP nominee JD (Just Doing the weird) Vance keep repeating the weird anecdote.

Post immigrant barbecue photo from Springfield, Ohio. Or skeleton image of Saint Bernard from a Brazilian vet college's collection, taken from Wikimedia Commons. Do your own research.

As Harris said during the debate, some of Trump’s remarks make a rational person question his ability to understand what is a fact and what isn’t.

Another example of the wacky, weird world of doddering Don: When Harris said foreign leaders don’t like him, Trump’s retort was that Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán thinks he is great. Now, I know that Viktor’s vigorous opposition to both immigration and the LGBTQ+ community have made him a bit of darling on the worst fringes of the right wing—but Orbán is an anti-democratic ruler, an authoritarian. Holding him up as your evidence that “world leaders” like you is, yup, weird.

June 2024, Giorgia Meloni, prime minister of Italy, speaks with Viktor Orbán, prime minister of Hungary. Is V the prominent world leader that would prove you have global popularity? Image from Wikimedia Commons by the European Union.

My wife doesn’t drink, but we had some large chocolate bars, and she decided we would play a non-alcoholic version of a drinking game during the debate. Instead of a shot, we would each break off and eat a small piece of chocolate every time we clearly heard Donald Trump say something inconsistent with reality. In others, one lie equals one munch.

I don’t think the chocolate lasted 20 minutes.

It’s an odd measure of our dysfunctional current politics and the disinformation age we live in, but it’s not likely Trump will lose much of his support despite his being the confused old man in the race. More than confused, Tuesday he was petulant, racist (his anti-immigrant extreme rants are racist dog whistles), even delusional.

Still, Trump’s support is rock solid. But the candidate, despite claiming he and JD are “solid” rather than “weird,” was clearly a bit shaky and unhinged Tuesday. He was unprepared to debate. He also seemed, to those who aren’t caught in his rather shockingly large, weird bubble of popularity, unprepared  and unqualified to be President.

Harris wasn’t perfect in her performance. Like many candidates in many debates, she preferred to deliver canned stump soundbites rather than actually answering the questions that were asked, a habit she started right off the bat with her first non-answer to the first question. Since starting her run, she has been correctly criticized for avoiding reporters and their nagging questions.

Still, she didn’t need to be perfect Tuesday night. The race is still close and Trump still has a clear path to victory, God helps us—but the night was a much better one for sane Kamala than crazy Donald.

Following the debate, Taylor Swift noted on Instagram that she is endorsing Kamala. Swift has endorsed Democrats in the past, and her public pronouncement wasn’t a surprise—but it was partly prompted by Trump, who had posted fake AI-generated Swift endorsements of Trump.

Most famous Instagram post in the immediate post-debate time period. A swift Swift reaction to the crazy.

Passing on those lies, and Trump's poor performance in the debate, seems to have been too much for Miss Swift.

As for me: I’m not single. I’m not childless. I’m not a lady. I have no cats. Even though I think of myself as a bit of a Swiftie in that I enjoy her songs, any political statement from any pop singer, even an intelligent, accomplished woman like Taylor Swift, isn’t going to move my political needle much.

And I concede the reality that I was already firmly in the “never Trump” camp well before Tuesday night anyway.

Still, what the heck. Viktor O’s endorsement? Fake stories of Springfield, Ohio’s endangered animals? Calling Kamala a “Marxist?” Trump is the worst. And the weirdest. The debate Tuesday just made that reality obvious.