The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.

-- Alvin Toffler

Observation: We on the right, and I definitely include myself here, made a tactical error in setting the expectations for Joe Biden so low that only a truly cognitively challenged man could fail to clear them. We set the victory conditions for Biden as just requiring that he form some coherent sentences, some of the time.
We screwed up.
But he still failed to beat the low, low expectations we set. We spotted him thirty points and he still threw six interceptions for touchdowns.

A commenter (sorry, I forget the name) pointed this out: if Biden had "a cold," why did he go to the Waffle House and touch people? Remember a "season of death," Joe? Once again we see the left's highly-contingent rules of "quarantine:" You must quarantine yourselves while they get haircuts, super-luxe French dinners, and chicken and waffles. Not to mention burning down businesses and killing cops.

Greg Gutfeld: They lied, they all lied
Good and necessary mockery and gloating. Liars should be mocked and despised.

Trump: The problem with Biden is not his age, he's the "most incompetent president in the history of our country"
Via John Sexton with more arguing among Democrats about whether to support Joe or flush him

Bari Weiss: "They Knew."

Rarely are so many lies dispelled in a single moment. Rarely are so many people exposed as liars and sycophants. Last night's debate was a watershed on both counts. The debate was not just a catastrophe for President Biden. And boy--oy--was it ever. But it was more than that. It was a catastrophe for an entire class of experts, journalists, and pundits, who have, since 2020, insisted that Biden was sharp as a tack, on top of his game, basically doing handstands while peppering his staff with tough questions about care for migrant children and aid to Ukraine. Anyone who committed the sin of using their own eyes on the 46th president was accused, variously, of being Trumpers; MAGA cult members who don't want American democracy to survive; ageists; or just dummies easily duped by "disinformation," "misinformation," "fake news," and, most recently, "cheapfakes."

Hat tip David Strom at Hot Air. Strom adds:

We need to remind people that they have been lied to. Forty-eight million people watched the debate according to the ratings, and they saw what they saw: that the media lied. We need to focus on that.

Indeed. Do not let them evade responsibility for their own remorseless, conscienceless, unceasing lying by claiming they were mere "dupes" of the White House.

Time's cover: "Panic."

Heritage puts out the call for researchers to help with issues regarding replacing a candidate -- to challenge the Democrats' maneuverings, I assume

The Scrolletter: Who's really running the White House? Because we now know for certain it isn't Turnip Truck Joe.

Never one for modesty, Obama also--as David Samuels observed in Tablet last August --made sure to drop O.J. Simpson If I Did It-style hints about how a "hypothetical" surrogate presidency might work: "That Obama might enjoy serving as a third-term president in all but name, running the government from his iPhone, was a thought expressed in public by Obama himself, both before and after he left office. "I used to say if I can make an arrangement where I had a stand-in or front man or front woman, and they had an earpiece in, and I was just in my basement in my sweats looking through the stuff, and I could sort of deliver the lines while someone was doing all the talking and ceremony," he told Steven Colbert in 2015, "I'd be fine with that because I found the work fascinating." Even with all these clues, the Washington press corps--fresh off their years of broadcasting fantasies about secret communications links between Trump Tower and the Kremlin--seemed unable to imagine, let alone report on, Obama's role in government."

Thanks to Dave Reaboi again

Unedited: Biden's post-debate interview from the Waffle House
"I had a sore throat." Thanks to former guest blogger @NiceDeb, now at AmGreatness

Sargon: The Cargo Cult Mentality and the Destruction of Formerly Billion-Dollar Intellectual Properties
Thanks to Dave Reaboi

Holy Crap, Ex-CNN Thumb Chris Cillizza attacks the White House for lying: "They knew."

They knew.
The big takeaway from last night is that the Biden White House knew the president was clearly a step (or three) slower.
And they spent months attacking ANYONE who suggested age was an issue and should be discussed openly.
Democrats should be FURIOUS.

So we've got a Blame Game going on. The media, which ALSO knew, is pretending they were totally DUPED by the White House, rather than being knowing co-conspirators in the psyop, which is what they were. But they're not going to admit that, so they're going to claim that Joe Biden is such a remarkable persuader that he just fooled them all.
If you were fooled by something so unbelievable: What is the point of you?
Note he's also pretending the Democrat party didn't know. The only bad actors here, this new psyop goes, were Joe Biden and his inner circle. All other Democrats and their media infiltrators were blameless, faultless, uncorrupted, pure.

"I watched the Biden-Trump debate alone in a Lisbon hotel room, and it made me weep," writes Thomas L. Friedman. "I cannot remember a more heartbreaking moment in American presidential campaign politics in my lifetime." HAHAHA Posted by: Hatari somewhere on Ventura Highway

Space Ice TENET ecI ecapS

Debate ratings: 48 million, which sounds like a lot, but that's down from the 73.1 million who watched the first debate in 2020
WaPo:

On Thursday, 8.8 million people watched the debate on Fox News, 8.7 million people watched on CNN, and just under 4 million people watched on MSNBC. Had CNN not allowed other networks to air the debate, CNN probably would have attracted a larger audience.

The total television audience of 47.9 million people will probably increase when the Nielsen ratings agency releases the final results later Friday.

So this doesn't include streaming, which is undoubtedly at its highest share of viewers ever. But streaming won't make up that 30 million gap.
Believe it or not, this is good news; this is ammunition for Joe Biden, giving him a chance to argue that not a lot of people saw the debate, and they were mostly Trump voters anyway, so that no lasting damage was done. We need to keep this evil man in the race.

Begun, the Biden meme wars have

Barack Obama
@BarackObama

Bad debate nights happen. Trust me, I know. But this election is still a choice between someone who has fought for ordinary folks his entire life and someone who only cares about himself. Between someone who tells the truth; who knows right from wrong and will give it to the American people straight -- and someone who lies through his teeth for his own benefit. Last night didn't change that, and it's why so much is at stake in November. http://joebiden.com

For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of Barack Obama. #IHopeHeSucceeds
Thanks to redridinghood.

There's this from Insty:
BLAMING THE REFS: Dems Blame CNN Moderators After Biden Debate Disaster: "Unforgivable."

You can always tell who lost a presidential debate by which party is slamming the moderators afterwards. And in the wake of Joe Biden and Donald Trump's first 2024 presidential debate, many progressives are focusing their fire on CNN's Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, calling out the duo for not fact-checking Trump in real time during the 90-minute face off.

Thursday's clash featured a performance by President Joe Biden that many are calling disastrous for his reelection chances, with CNN's own post-debate panelists suggesting the president should consider withdrawing from the race.

Posted by: Archimedes

Alexander S. Vindman
@AVindman

What did Trump do during his four years to end the Russia-Ukraine war? Nothing. Trump is full of shit.
--------
That cannot be real. WTF is going on?
Posted by: Seems Legit

Ed Morrissey: Make the media pay for its latest psyop against the American public, make them admit they all lied
The new spin from Axios is that Biden was -- get this -- "overprepared" for the debate, his head so stuffed with facts and arcane statistics he got lost in all the "minutiae" he had memorized with his Einsteinian Mind Palace. Yes, obviously that was the problem, he was too smart, too cogent, and too well-prepared to sound like he was in command of the facts (and in command of his own mind)