Writing a weekly political opinion column doesn’t require a commitment to balance. I am free to be just as biased as I’d like, but unrelenting partisan zealotry seems certain to shrink my audience. My editor ribs me about my virtual fan club (its true size and reach unknown), although this might be Trumpian sarcasm. Who I really wish to reach are the “hate readers” who’re intrigued enough to search for whatever outrage I may be promulgating each week and guaranteed to deliver a frisson of irritation. Keeping these critics returning demands a certain degree of even-handedness. For that reason, I dug through my archives for the Colorado Statesman report I penned following the first presidential debate between challenger Mitt Romney and Barack Obama at the University of Denver.

I noted, “Mitt Romney thumped the leader of the free world like a drum last night. As an aging high school debater, it was evident Romney was getting the better of the clash — repeatedly forcing the discussion to go where he wanted.” I was not alone in my 2012 assessment, as Obama conceded himself following President Joe Biden’s pathetic debate performance this past June, “Bad debate nights happen, I know.” We witnessed a similar thrashing of an American president in Philadelphia last Tuesday where Vice President Kamala Harris kept former President Donald Trump bent-over for 90 minutes with verbal thrusts to the groin. It was Teddy Roosevelt who observed, “If you’ve got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.” Harris’ decision to force a handshake and offer instruction on how to properly pronounce her name functioned like a quick knee to the nether region Trump feels women will let him seize because he’s a celebrity. It was a discombobulating lesson for a convicted sexual predator.

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Reaching back 46 years to my first campaign for the Colorado legislature, Denver was receiving a rapid influx of Vietnamese, Laotian and assorted Southeast Asian refugees left homeless by our hasty departure from Saigon in 1975. Settling along Federal Boulevard in west Denver, these immigrants opened excellent Vietnamese restaurants and Asian markets. Soon a rumor spread the Vietnamese were snatching Canadian geese from city parks and taking them home for dinner. It was never proven this was actually happening. As a jogger at the time, reducing geese droppings on the trail around Rocky Mountain Lake in north Denver didn’t sound like such a bad idea, but I saw no such improvement. By 1999, the year my son graduated from Manual High School, every Denver senior class had a Vietnamese valedictorian.

When J.D. Vance first suggested Haitians were poaching their neighbors’ dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio, it seemed unlikely. No one examines what gets thrown into a stew pot, but I know you don’t mess with other people’s dogs. They’re members of the family. When Trump repeated this tale during the debate, the ABC moderators corrected him by pointing out the city manager had labelled the story as a hoax. Within nanoseconds there was caterwauling online and from Fox News that ABC was prejudiced for correcting the former president. Trump hardly helped himself with the lame claim, “I saw it on television.” What the hell is this man watching? It sounds like some parental controls are in order. No wonder he’s ducking another debate.

You would think Trump’s effort to prove he attracted the largest inaugural crowd ever — larger than the million Americans who came to Washington for Obama’s history-shattering election as the nation’s first black president — while aerial photos showed it was a lie might have tempered his obsession with crowd size. But, no, Kamala provoked him into claiming “We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics.” Another load of bunk, but he proceeded to accuse Harris of paying people to attend her rallies and busing them in. Wouldn’t you expect someone to have noticed these fleets of buses? And who, in their right mind, would use Viktor Orban, an autocratic thug, for a character reference? Perhaps there’s something to the adage it takes one to know one. As Time’s D.C. correspondent observed, “A poised and prepared Kamala Harris met a crabby and thin-skinned Donald Trump in a presidential debate, and it didn’t feel like much of a fair fight.”

Democrats, however, can’t intoxicate themselves with a single successful debate. Obama recovered from his flogging in 2012 and won an easy victory in November. As crazy as the Trump assertions American elementary schools are whisking children into transsexual surgeries without parental permission, or that nine years after calling for the repeal of Obamacare he finally has “concepts of a  plan” — his base remains solidly behind him. Does anyone actually believe Biden and Harris hate our country (and each other)? Are they also dead set on “destroying this country” together? And, why is it Republicans can never produce a single kid, or his or her parents, after being kidnapped? Why can’t they find a handful of the “millions of illegal aliens” who are voting for Democrats? If you were watching carefully, you may have noticed the majority of prosecuted illegal voters were Trumpsters who marked the ballots of relatives or neighbors.

Liz Cheney, who surprised no one by endorsing Kamala Harris, recently told an interviewer, “We need to be a nation ruled by law and not by money.” She also noted, “Men have been running the world and it isn’t really going so well.” True enough. Kamala has said she’s likely to name a Republican to her cabinet. A Republican woman smart enough to say, “There’s no place for bystanders in a constitutional republic. You cannot be loyal to Donald Trump and the Constitution,” sounds like just the pick for Attorney General. Unlike the slow-walking Merrick Garland, she’d pursue the federal cases against our former guy with a fury that would frighten the guardians protecting the Gates of Hades.

Miller Hudson is a public affairs consultant and a former Colorado legislator.