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The funniest, or the saddest, thing about this week's presidential debate is that it occurred the night before Sept. 11, a holy holiday of death that's been forgotten by everyone except politicians looking to be seen at the remembrance ceremony, firefighters, unindicted police officers and the families of the dead, whose aching sadness cannot be hidden by the biggest of flags.

I was in a newsroom the day the planes went into the towers, and we knew what to do. We talked to politicians on the phone so they could call for unity. We desperately searched for the name of a local who had died down there in New York, or a relative of one of the dead. It was like a shooting on the sidewalk because, if you're a reporter, and you're good at it, everything is like a shooting on the sidewalk. You get the names right, you find a someone who was personally saddened by the event, and you call someone who is holding office. You cover elections and teachers strikes exactly the same way.

We didn't consider Donald Trump in those days. No one did. He was a real estate developer in New York, and he'd married a couple of women. He was like John F. Kennedy if John F. Kennedy hadn't fought in a war but had just been rich all his life, and done pretty good with the ladies.

We were a nation in mourning, and we weren't very good at being in mourning. We told jokes about Arabs and their supposed penchant for marrying goats, and we plastered a flag on every piece of stationary, and we cried out for vengeance, and we did not mob the recruitment offices.

You couldn't be sad enough. When I got off work that night, I went to a bar, which is what certain men of my generation do when they're too sad to be alone and sober.

It wasn't a beautiful time, and we didn't all come together in unity. What we did was put some nail polish over anything that was wrong, and put a flag in the window, and then we went to a couple wars.

They were Donald Trump wars because no one HAD to go, and unlike Vietnam, if you didn't go, no one called you ugly names. You could stay home and be loudly, untruthfully, bloodily patriotic, and no one would ask you to DO anything. You bought a T-shirt with the American flag on the front and the words "These Colors Don't Run," and you were free to call for worldwide death.

That kind of lying, loud, risk-free patriotism led us to Donald Trump the way the sixth bourbon leads you to text an old girlfriend. It's not a good idea, and she doesn't want you anymore. If she does, there's something wrong with her.

Donald Trump makes us believe that the sixth bourbon is talking sense, that somehow, we can text the older America, and the foreigners will go away, and the steel mills will reopen, and the gays will just shut up about it, and Black guys will stop getting our white daughters pregnant, and we can all have a 1965 Ford Mustang, and gas will be under a dollar a gallon, maybe even free. Maybe wives will stay with us no matter how we treat them, and maybe men will stay.

Gone. All gone.

The sixth bourbon isn't talking sense, and this week's debate sounded like a high school teacher explaining to one of her former students how he'd ruined his life, and how she knew he would, and he shouldn't have expected anything else.

The people who support Donald Trump need to ask the bartender for their tab and go home. The seventh bourbon will just make things worse.

To find out more about Marc Dion, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's latest book, a collection of his best columns, is called "Mean Old Liberal." It is available in paperback from Amazon.com and for Nook, Kindle, and iBooks.