James Fallows is a veteran writer about American politics. What follows is the beginning of his reaction to last night’s debate. Open the link to read it all. Lies went unrefuted.

He begins:

Deb and I watched every minute of the dreadful “debate” tonight on CNN. I grabbed the remote to turn off the TV the instant the pundit-panels kicked in. A man can take only so much.

So what follows is my own “certified organic” reaction to what I just saw. It may or may not match the prevailing reaction tone—I haven’t seen or listened to any of it. That’s for the morning. Apologies in advance for inevitable late-night typos. 

1) The overview: A disastrous start.

Thirty minutes in I tweeted out this summary:

Things shifted—in Biden’s favor, and against Trump—as the night went on. But I can’t imagine that many people stuck it out as long as I felt obliged to. And what made the opening-minutes performance so striking is the “range” point I mention in the tweet, which is a version of the famed “expectations game.”

—Biden’s range. Everyone know that Joe Biden is old. And everyone has seen the way his carriage, his gait, his facial expressions have become stiffer and more labored during his time in office.

But anyone who has watched Biden in office has seen him time and again“exceed expectations”—seeming to shake off the years and come on strongest when the stakes were highest. The best-known recent example was this year’s State of the Union address. In the days before, Fox and the GOP were presenting him as comatose. On the day after, they were saying that he’d shouted too much and must have been on pep pills — what else could have made him come across so forcefully? 

The State of the Union wasn’t the only example. Biden also did very well with his big D-Day address just this month, with his commencement speech at Morehouse before that, and in most other recent performances. His trademark had become “beating the spread,” rallying when it counted most.

That is what I was expecting tonight. The Trump forces must also have been expecting it, given their revival this week of the “pep-pills” line to pre-discount a strong Biden performance. 

So that is why his labored, halting, raspy, fact-clogged, uneasy sounding first set of answers was so startling. Without consciously realizing it, I had gotten used to the idea that in a crunch he could sound younger than he looks. This time he sounded very old. That’s what I meant by the bottom of his range.

—The range for Trump. Everyone knows that Trump rambles and rants and makes things up as he plays to the crowd. And in its sentence-by-sentence content, what he said this evening was as outrageous a slurry of insults, nonsense, narcissism, and lies as any of his standard rally speech. I can type fast, but I literally could not note the lies down as quickly as he uttered them. Daniel Dale and others at CNN tried to keep up in an online tally here. 

But sentence by sentence, the Trump of these opening minutes sounded more polite, less ranting, more concise, and generally more “normal” than the man who spins his stories about sharks or shouts that everything is rigged. That’s what I meant about the high end of his range. In one of the debate chronicles I wrote back in the pre-Trump era, I noted that sometimes you can judge a debate’s effect by watching it with the sound turned off, and just noting the expressions and body language. In tonight’s case, if you listened “with the words turned off” — ignoring content and just listening to tone of voice — you’d hear sounding much more confident and forceful, and, bizarrely, calmer, than Biden did.

—And for CNN. The moderators, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, are both fully capable of very tough follow-up questioning. They did almost zero of that tonight, presumably because of whatever pact CNN had to sign to make the debate happen.

As a result, Trump could reel off one preposterous, defamatory, easily disprovable lie after another—for instance, that Biden is a “Manchurian Candidate” paid by the Chinese government, or Trump’s repeated claim that Democratic governors favored making it legal to kill babies “even after birth”—and Bash or Tapper would respond with, “Thank you. And now to you, President Biden…” 

Even at his best, Biden wouldn’t have been able to keep up with the torrent of lies. No one could: You can get out a lie in one sentence, but it can take three or four to explain the truth. (For instance: Trump’s claim that Biden was going to “wipe out” Social Security and Medicare by putting “millions and millions” of illegal immigrants on the rolls. In fact, immigrants improve the finances of those programs, because they are on average young. But, as you see, it takes more words to lay that out.) 

The net effect: Trump started out the debate lying but sounding controlled; Biden started out fact-clogged and sounding unsteady; and CNN became the sluice for this toxic lie-dense fare.