HEMPSTEAD, LONG ISLAND—Being a Special Debate Pregame episode of our semi-regular weekly survey of the state of Our National Dialogue which, as you know, is what Robert Johnson would have come up with had he composed "Derp Shrimp Blues."

On Sunday, in broadcasting's Overlook Hotel, where my man Chuck Todd always has been the caretaker, the news had gotten around that, in a response to the Hillary Rodham Clinton campaign having invited Donald Trump-bashing zillionaire Mark Cuban to sit in the front row of Monday night's debate at Hofstra University, El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago's people were threatening to bring Gennifer Flowers, one of Bill Clinton's onetime paramours.

My man Chuck Todd thought this was ill-advised. He had some advice. Per the great TBogg at Raw Story:

"It would have made more sense to me if Trump had responded by bringing a grieving mother of one of the Benghazi, one of the Benghazi grieving family members. That seems to be the counter that would have made a policy sense."

Chuck must be so very, very proud. Josh's joint has the reason.

Here's the full rundown: Mark Geist, who survived the 2012 attack on a U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, has endorsed Trump and appeared in a National Rifle Association ad criticizing Clinton. Karen Vaughn, a Gold Star mother, organized a meeting between Trump and several Gold Star families shortly after the Republican nominee lashed out at the Khan family. She said she was not offended by Trump's attacks on the Khans.

Also, on CNN on Monday afternoon, obvious anagram Reince Priebus was very proud of his candidate's proven track record in high-pressure televised situations.

"Studying, preparing, going through hypotheticals and what scenarios might come up, but he's very comfortable," the RNC chair replied. "He did a great job in our primary debates. He's also been through, what, 14 seasons, season finales. He will be prepared."

(Here's where I point out that James Arness went through 20 season finales, so, obviously, he should have been president in 1968 instead of Nixon.)

Also on CNN on Monday afternoon, they asked some jamoke or another to give his impression of the respective weaknesses of the two candidates.

The first item on Trump's list was "The Truth."

The first item on HRC's list was "Tends To Get Into The Weeds in policy discussions."

So being a lying sack of hair and being too devoted to the details of public policy are now equal drawbacks to being a presidential candidate. It's nice to know that going forward. It will make life much easier going forward when we nominate a car thief, a cat burglar, or a Bernese Mountain Dog.

There is no use in talking about where "The Bar" is now for the Republican nominee. It sank all the way to the earth's core Sunday morning and melted from the heat. What I am fairly sure of now is that there probably is no way for Hillary Rodham Clinton to win the debate. She might come away with a draw, but even that will take work because, as the CNN jamoke said, knowing what she's talking about is the worst possible mistake she can make.

And that brings us to an interesting New York Times oral history of the first debate in 2000 between Al Gore and C-Plus Augustus, last seen being snuggled by the First Lady over the weekend. If you want to know when the age of "post-truth politics began," that campaign was its earliest manifestation, the stone-knives-and-bearskins epoch of post-truth politics. We are now living in the Jet Age of post-truth politics and I don't even want to think about what the Space Age of post-truth politics will be like. Good luck, kidz!

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Anyway, if you want a very clear manifestation of how the expectations playing field was tilted Monday night against HRC and her fatal depth of knowledge, consider that the Times summons up an important moment in what was perhaps the most consequential act of political malpractice prior to the one we're living through now. All year, the elite political press gobbled up whatever Republican oppo was fed to them, simply because they didn't like Al Gore.

(He thought he was sooooooo smart.)

At a debate in New Hampshire against Bill Bradley, who opposed him in the Democratic primaries that year, to my everlasting astonishment, the assembled scribes actually booed one of Gore's answers. (Don't come at me. You know you did.) I was struck by this because that behavior would get you kicked out of every press box in the major leagues. I once was severely reprimanded at Fenway for the offense of laughing too loudly at the Cleveland Indians.

This behavior continued throughout the campaign, and the Times coverage was right there in the heart of it. From beat reporter Kit Seelye all the way up to the peak of Bandini Mountain where can be found the castle of Lady Dowd, the Times enslaved itself to a narrative by which Gore was too smart, too snotty, and too…something to be president. If you were not following the redoubtable Bob Somerby at his Daily Howler blog in real time, then this 2007 Vanity Fair postmortem by Evgenia Peretz is as good a precis as there is.

Eight years ago, in the bastions of the "liberal media" that were supposed to love Gore—The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, CNN—he was variously described as "repellent," "delusional," a vote-rigger," a man who "lies like a rug," "Pinocchio." Eric Pooley, who covered him for Time magazine, says, "He brought out the creative-writing student in so many reporters.… Everybody kind of let loose on the guy."

Yeah, no duh, as the kidz say. Seelye was particularly egregious.

Building on the narrative established by the Love Storyand Internet episodes, Seelye, her critics charge, repeatedly tinged what should have been straight reporting with attitude or hints at Gore's insincerity. Describing a stump speech in Tennessee, she wrote, "He also made an appeal based on what he described as his hard work for the state—as if a debt were owed in return for years of service." Writing how he encouraged an audience to get out and vote at the primary, she said, "Vice President Al Gore may have questioned the effects of the internal combustion engine, but not when it comes to transportation to the polls. Today he exhorted a union audience in Knoxville, Iowa, to pile into vans—not cars, but gas-guzzling vans—and haul friends to the Iowa caucuses on January 24." She would not just say that he was simply fund-raising. "Vice President Al Gore was back to business as usual today—trolling for money," she wrote. In another piece, he was "ever on the prowl for money."

(If you need an example of the dry rot that creeping Dowdism has injected into elite political journalism, Seelye's coverage of the Gore campaign is the purest example of it.)

My favorite example from the campaign, prior to the coverage of the first debate, which we will get to in a moment, was when Gore visited a school in New Hampshire and was asked about his environmental record, especially as regards toxic waste. This was his answer which, admittedly, was a few commas long on being artful.

"I looked around the country for other sites like that. I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal. I had the first hearing on that issue and Toone, Tennessee. That was the one you didn't hear of, but that was the one that started it all.… We passed a major national law to clean up hazardous dumpsites, and we had new efforts to stop the practices that ended up poisoning water around the country.… It all happened because one high-school student got involved."

Amazingly, and firing-ly, if there had been anyone at the Times that cared enough at that point, that quote got barbered by Seelye, among others, until it appeared that Gore had claimed to have "discovered" the dead zone at Love Canal. The great thing is that the bigtime reporters got called out in real time by the high-school seniors who had been in attendance. No matter. This, of course, was added to the list of "exaggerations" and "lies" that the elite political press largely had either made up or misinterpreted out of pure malice. Now is when we come to the first debate against George W. Bush. And then la Dowd checked in with what is quite possibly the dumbest piece of political analysis in a career made from dumb pieces of political analysis.

"Al Gore is so feminized and diversified and ecologically correct, he's practically lactating."

Christ, what a useless waste of space.

This was the backdrop for the first presidential debate. After the debate, in which Bush was plainly out of his depth on a number of issues, including his own tax plan, for which Paul Krugman charbroiled him in real time, the analysis was a disgrace. Gore was mocked for saying that he would keep Social Security and Medicare in a "lockbox" to protect it from the deficit hawks who were looking at it hungrily. (Saturday Night Live had some glorious fun with that one.) He was mocked for knowing the names of various foreign leaders, especially in the Balkans, which were just then coming out of an historic bloodletting.

Meanwhile, Bush looked like someone who had to be tied to the podium to keep from floating away. Every poll taken in the immediate aftermath, and almost every television pundit who went on camera in the immediate aftermath, said that Gore had won the debate going away.

And then, as Peretz recalled, this happened.

Republican operatives promptly spliced together a reel of Gore sighing, which was then sent to right-wing radio outlets. Eighteen hours later, the pundits could talk of little else. "They could hear you audibly sighing or sounding exasperated as Governor Bush was answering questions," Katie Couric scolded him the next day on theTodayshow. "Do you think that's presidential behavior?" For the Times's Frank Bruni, the sighs weren't as galling as Gore's familiarity with the names of foreign leaders. "It was not enough for Vice President Al Gore to venture a crisp pronunciation of Milosevic, as in Slobodan," he wrote. "Mr. Gore had to go a step further, volunteering the name of Mr. Milosevic's challenger Vojislav Kostunica."

As we learned to our horror over the ensuing eight years, everything Gore said about his opponent came true with a vengeance. But Gore sighed, and sighed, and sighed. Post-truth politics were firmly established in that moment. And the way you know it did was to read the oral history of that debate presented by the Times 16 bloody years later. Everybody, including Democrats like Paul Begala, are still living the fantasy that was created by the media in the aftermath of a debate that Gore clearly won.

BEGALA: For all of Gore's good answers, his feelings for Bush was his fatal flaw. You can't afford to look across the stage with that kind of contempt at someone who millions of people have nominated as their standard-bearer, and not have it bleed over to the audience and have them see you negatively.

Remember, it was not until some time afterwards, when Republican spinners attached Gore's purported sighing—which was hardly audible at home—to a pre-existing narrative that the elite political press had bought wholesale, that what Begala describes above actually became true. You can tote up the cost of doing that the next time you happen to drop by Arlington National Cemetery. You will also note that none of this history, to which the New York Times was central, appears in the oral history.

And, before one of the principals complains, this behavior went on right through the rest of the election. In September, Gore had to deal with some stupidity about a joke he'd told regarding a union song that he said had been his lullabye, and an honest-to-god "controversy" about what medicine he'd fed his dog. So when people who were there start talking about how Gore's numbers tanked after the first debate, this is what they're talking about.

If the pregame analysis is any indication, we are headed down that same very perilous road. Hillary Rodham Clinton has to be very careful not to be too smart, or too informed, or too detailed in what she plans to do for the nation, because that would be bad, because post-truth politics is all performance art. This is no way to run a democratic republic but, what the hell, we stopped caring about that back in January.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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