Good or Bad for the Jews

"Good or Bad for the Jews"

Many years ago, and for many years, I would travel to Morocco to visit uncles, cousins, and my paternal grandmother. Some lived in Tangiers;...

Thursday, October 20, 2016

The Final Debate

The debate. I didn't watch it. I listened to it on Sirius radio as I drove back from San Diego. I, therefore, did not see the faces, the gestures or any of the other body language. Just listening to it, however, I thought Trump won most of it. He certainly gave the best summation either of the two has given at the end of any of the debates. He rocked her on the Clinton Foundation and on Wikileaks. I thought her answers were weak and tired.

Got to give credit to Chris Wallace who I thought was BY FAR the best moderator of the Presidential and Vice-Presidential debates. He brought up topics previously ignored and pressed both candidates, and did a credible job of controlling both candidates without being obnoxious.

As usual, however, Trump gave the media something to yammer on about. He, again, stepped on his own performance. He, frankly, gave a bad answer on the question of whether he would accept the results of the election if he lost. I cringed while driving upon hearing his "I'll keep you in suspense." That gave Clinton the opening to launch one of her faux patriotic speeches about how that was unprecedented in 240 years of American elections, blah, blah, blah. She, of course, ignored, among others, the election of 1860, when a good chunk of American states seceded from the Union because they would not accept the election of Abraham Lincoln, and, more recently and less dramatic, Al Gore's lengthy refusal to admit he had been beaten in Florida by George W. Bush--both of those refusals, by the way, were by the Democratic Party. Trump needs a better answer, especially since his running mate and his own daughter have stated that, of course, Trump would accept the results. Bad coordination that.

I think Trump should have turned the question around and said something along the lines of, "Hillary, will you, right now, disavow the actions of your party--which we learned about through Wikileaks--to disrupt my rallies with violence and intimidate my followers? Will you join me in insisting that voters must be US citizens and that poll workers must insist that those who vote are indeed Americans and eligible to vote? Will you ask your party machine to help scrub from the rolls dead voters, illegal aliens, felons, etc.? Will you promise not to do what you did to Bernie Sanders? Will you abandon the Democratic Party's long, long history of electoral violence and fraud?"

Anyhow, yes, I think Trump "won" the debate, but will it make a difference? How many genuinely undecided were watching? Plus, of course, millions of people, living and dead, American and foreign, already have cast ballots in the idiotic process known as "early voting."

23 comments:

  1. The problem with brilliant ex post facto answers is that your not in the moment. Being up on that stage with all that's on the line is likely more stressful than a gunfight. The debates are not so much about stating your positions, but handling yourself under the most amount of pressure outside of the office itself. I think he did well. We all know that Hillary is completely scripted from Wikileaks. Trump is all stream of consciences, and the fact that he can take on a committee that spent months prepping Hillary's responses shows he can handle pressure.

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    1. Absolutely. I see people complain that he is not a professional pol who would come up with good, and rehearsed (I knew Jack Kennedy...), responses. They guy is not a pro. He is pretty good on TV from his previous experience but he is a fast learner, too.

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    2. Sorry, I don't see much evidence that Trump is a fast learner. If he were, his campaign would have been far more disciplined starting even before he sewed up the nomination.

      There's also not much evidence that he's a fast thinker, which is just as crucial. Even as he was delivering his response to the question of whether he would accept the outcome, I was thinking something along the lines of, "I respect, and will always respect, the will of the American people. If the results clearly reflect that, I will of course abide by them. But if there is any question, I reserve the right to wait until the answer is clearer, just as Al Gore did in 2000."

      Obviously, these are better-organized words than my thoughts at the time while Trump was talking, but this conveys the gist of them. And if someone's running for president, I expect him to be more articulate than I am. I also expect a would-be president to be prepared to answer a question like that.

      But Trump wasn't even in the ballpark. Instead, he sounded small and churlish, and as a bonus he gave Hillary an entirely undeserved opening to attack him -- not to mention headline fodder for newspapers and networks throughout the country.

      It was an unforced error, something Trump commits time after time after time. And yet people still keep making excuses for him.

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  2. Three times this woman said, "I will not add one penny to our national debt". And neither Chris Wallace nor Trump called her out on it. We have really sunk to new lows with this obviously undo-able promise! Maybe this is like, "I never had sexual relations ... not a single time" ... meaning, in lawyerese, "I did have sex ... but it was multiple times"! Perhaps Hellary must really have been saying she would "add quadrillions of pennies to our debt" and not just "one"! I'm sick to my stomach with these Clintons' and their lawyerly lies!

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  3. There’s another explanation for Bill Clinton’s choice of words in 1998 -- no less devious, but different. He said, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky.” I might be mistaken, but I think the words “sexual relations” are ordinarily taken to mean penile-vaginal penetration and not oral sex. So, there’s a chance what he said was actually true. It depends on what the meaning of “sexual relations” is, doesn’t it?

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    1. Or, if you will excuse the expression, a double header ...

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    2. Ach, George, I don't know who is worse, you for saying that, or me for laughing at it. I strongly suspect that we are those two boys the teacher seated in opposite corners of the room, lest we play together and get up to mischief.

      Michael Adams

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  4. I didn't "watch" much of it either. I had it on my computer, and had that part of the screen covered much of the time while listening to the audio, though I did occasionally take a look. Don't think I missed much, though.

    "Got to give credit to Chris Wallace who I thought was BY FAR the best moderator of the Presidential and Vice-Presidential debates."

    +1. Saw a Breitbart poll (which of course is not going to be unbiased) asking who the best moderator was. Wallace had an incredible 97% of the vote.

    Agree that Trump keeps shooting himself in the foot. I think his biggest problem is just a lack of focus.

    I don't know how many people are paying attention to the staged violence and the vote fraud. He should have kept hitting her on those topics (and immigration - why, oh why, did he pivot away from it, his best topic?) again and again and again.

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    1. Lack of focus? Your post got me thinking something else. Trump likes to intimidate best word I can come uo with) but when the target falls, he is really too nice a guy to kick someone when down. Despite the image he cultivates, I don't think he really has the "killer instinct".

      He reminds me of my big Bro :)

      BC

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  5. He also missed a great opportunity when she said she was in the situation room during the Bin Laden raid. He should have asked why she was not in that same room when Benghazi was happening.

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  6. That would have been a great answer on voter fraud. Maybe he can still give it.
    One of my relatives, who is pretty much a lib, thought Trump was presidential, calm, and focused and thought he won. So that's encouraging.
    I hope people realize that a debate performance is not the same thing as being a great president. Eisenhower for example. He was known for getting his tongue in knots but was a pretty great president.

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  7. I would humbly submit Reptillary isn't so "graciously accepting of election results" either - in the sense of say, John McCain who once he ran and got tromped, didn't repeat the offense of running for President. So as Obama tromped Reptillary last go round neither did she so graciously slink off to the swamps of Connecticut from whence she first developed from gills.

    ***

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  8. Disagree re: accepting election results if Trump lost. The Left, and the media (sorry for the redundancy) want a "heads, I win; tails, you lose" scenario.

    That way, when the dirty work pointed out by Wikileaks & Project Veritas has been accomplished, and the election fraud has been blatantly committed, Trump will be blasted by the media for "going back on his promise!" if he calls out the obvious fraud.

    He wasn't born yesterday, and he saw right through that ruse.

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  9. Concur E-man!
    Also tickled by Trumps morning after retort,
    'If I win I'll except the results'... he knows the enemy! Suspect it came after many years of dealing with the double-dealing bastages in NYC, State, and Federal politics, including the carpet-bagging Clintons!
    On Watch~~~
    "Let's Roll"

    P.S. The side-show flair and his carneyman grin methinks was developed sometime later via his TV facetime!

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  10. You're right! The only reason I would vote for him is the fact that I fear Hillary will complete the destruction that eight years of Obama has started.

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  11. I have noticed that when an election is close, and it appears that the Republican has won, they will have as many recounts as it takes for the Democrat to win. I noticed this at the last Oregon state gubernatorial election.

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    1. See Christine Gregoire, WA state gubernatorial election a few years back. Amazing how those lost ballot boxes seem to only hold ballots for the Dems.

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  12. The real question is will Obama accept the election results and not resort to some executive action chicanery to deny Trump the office and remain in power. The establishment will not go quietly.

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  13. And you never confirm the length of time to launch a nuclear response. I still will not reveal the operating depth of our subs from the 1960-70s, regardless of any supposed wide spread knowledge on that info because it gives substance to the operating depth when a person with a security clearance and who served on board such boats acknowledges it.
    Trump's "such a nasty woman" statement at the end of the debate made me cringe, but the SS, FBI and DoS security personnel who have protected have reported that recently and in-effect agree publicly with Trump. But in reality this shows she is a STUPID women in all things "national security", a President's primary responsibility. Thus she is not suitable to be President, since such stupidity can get 100's of millions killed.

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    1. Crazy isn't it, that me, you and others like us can maintain as required the strictures of a security clearance for decades after it is dormant, but the SecState couldn't even manage it in real time.

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  14. So how many candidates over the years were asked "whether he would accept the results of the election if he lost)? During the primary they asked Trump if he would accept the vote and support whoever was the candidate. He finally forced them to ask every candidate that question. So why was he asked that and not the others? And then when Trump was the candidate did all those others who swore they would support him actually follow through?

    I thought it was a stupid "gotcha" question intended to make Trump look bad. Sure you could argue that Trump stepped in it with his answer but that would be to ignore his point about the election being rigged. The Democrats have stolen every close election for the last 100 years or more. Of course the election is rigged. I am so happy that a major candidate finally has the guts to say so. They are stealing the Virginia election and they will steal PA and Ohio to. More than likely they will steal Florida and they will try to steal NC.

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  15. http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2016/10/not-rigged-thrown-bill-campenni-comments.php

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