New Orleans        I don’t watch the debates.  I don’t have high blood pressure or heart issues, but my attitude is pretty much, “why would I want to take the chance?”  I have the same attitude in watching the Saints.  I’d rather check the score and grab the highlights.  I’ll read the after-action reports and have a sense of it all.  Certainly, I knew after the Trump v. Biden first round that a lot was riding on Harris v. Trump, but I was pretty confident that she could handle this. Plus, I was driving and had a great excuse.

Now as the days go by, the verdict from almost anyone who is in the least objective is that Harris shredded him like recycled paper.  When Karl Rove, the Bush presidency Svengali, writing on the Wall Street Journal, concurs that it was a beat down by Harris, you just know as someone else wrote that she “wiped the floor” with Trump.

Talking to a colleague who lives in central Ohio, not far from Columbus, yesterday, he said he was seriously thinking about driving to Springfield, just in solidarity to show support for the fine folks there, who Trump lambasted broadly as eating cats, largely a slap at Haitians.  He also repeated his claim that “he had read” that she wasn’t black.  There are two problems there that are a slap in the face of any observer.  One, how unbelievably racist!  The other is the fact that it’s common knowledge that he’s no big reader, so that’s likely a big fib as well.

But, that’s not all by a longshot.  Mi companera, unlike me, has a higher tolerance for pain, and she did watch the debate.  As she reported to me, as a woman and a feminist, she couldn’t believe that Trump had also claimed that Harris “put out.”  Are you kidding, a sexual slur, insinuating that a woman running for president and the Vice-President of the United States is some kind of slut?  How could that be possible?  I had read all of the big papers dissecting the debate, including a bunch of women columnists, and didn’t see a word about this kind of locker room crack.  I Googled and found nothing.  I saw something that mentioned the phrase.  Maybe you misheard, I asked her?  How could it be possible that American women of all persuasions aren’t up in arms over that crack?

She hadn’t misheard.  She sent me a YouTube link to this part of the debate.  Here’s what Trump said:

“I don’t know.  All I can say is that I read where she’s not Black, that she put out.  I’ll say that.”

I know he’s desperate, and I know he’s losing, but how low can anyone go?  Worse, how is it possible that any woman in America can vote for someone who says that in a presidential campaign, on national TV, about any woman, much less his opponent, the Vice-President of the United States.  There’s all the #MeToo problems he has.  There’s his constant misogynist, but this goes past that.

Have we become so inured to his abuses and hate speech that this slur isn’t even condemned?  We have all of these politicians trying to regulate AI because teenage boys and young men are putting the heads of classmates and others from Facebook on pornography sites.  They want to legislate about that, but are silent when an old man tries to slut-shame a 59-year-old woman running for president.  How can that be possible?

Of course, Harris was so classy that she didn’t even acknowledge the insult, which is brilliant, but instead gut punched him on his efforts to use racism to divide Americans.  That’s why she didn’t call him out for this.  It was water off a duck’s back.  She doesn’t take his bait.

That doesn’t explain how any of us who heard or know about this attack should be silent.