From Salon:

The presidential nominee of one party is a convicted felon, a business failure, an adjudicated rapist in civil court who paid off a porn star and advocated grabbing women by their pu**y if you’re a celebrity because you can get away with it and like it. Is there any condition under which such a candidate should be taken seriously for the office of president? That someone IS speaks volumes about the corruption inherent in our system.

Mainstream news outlets were in their glory this week as they prepped viewers for Thursday’s Biden-Trump debate. Weirdly, much of the advance coverage came in the form of “how-to” stories. CNN ran this online article: “How to watch Thursday’s CNN Presidential Debate.” USA Today served up a similar story. The ever-helpful New York Times offered this: “How Can Biden Win the Debate? Trump? Five Tips for Each Candidate.”

Is this the best they can do? One of the candidates, Donald Trump, has spent years falsely accusing Democrats of stealing the 2020 presidential election. He lied about his role in encouraging a mob to storm the Capitol in an attempt to prevent certification of the election results. He knows he lost the election but has tried to convince various courts to nullify the results.

And yet the mainstream media continue to pretend that Trump is a normal candidate. That he “should be taken seriously for the office of president,” as the Salon writer put it.

“Quit whining,” my neighbor Swamp Rabbit said as I listed examples of negligence in media coverage of the presidential race. “The media ain’t the enemy. Their job is to cover debates the same way they cover ballgames — who won, who lost, who’s got momentum.”

He was making me angry. “We’re not talking about a ballgame. The media should be reminding voters that one of the candidates rejects the Constitution and would ignore it if he got back in power.”

The TV networks are the worst of the lot, I told him. During and directly after the debate CNN’s moderators should have called out Trump’s lies, as the Associated Press did today. Biden does not want to raise our taxes “by four times.” While president, Trump did not have “the best environmental numbers ever” — the opposite is true. Nancy Pelosi did not oppose the use of the National Guard during the Jan. 6 riot. Again, the opposite is true. Pro-choice advocates are not calling for abortions “after birth,” whatever that means. Trump did not preside over “the greatest economy in history.” When he left office, the economy was a wreck. Biden did not call African Americans “superpredators.” Immigrants are not causing a nationwide increase in crime. Violent crime in this country is actually decreasing. And that’s not even the half of it…

“Settle down,” Swamp Rabbit said. “Biden stretched the truth a couple times, too. Besides, the peeps don’t care about facts, they care about appearances. It ain’t the media’s fault that Biden sounded feeble and looked like he was gonna keel over. It ain’t their fault the stupid Democrats wanted an 81-year-old guy to be their nominee.”

Maybe not, I told him. But it is their fault that, once again, they’re helping legitimize the most villainous and dangerous presidential candidate in American history.

And that’s no lie.