Monday, October 10, 2016

Dancing with the Devil: The Town Hall Debate




Only saw the last 50 minutes of the town hall debate, but I'd have to say, if there are still any undecided or potentially dissuade-able voters out there, it had to help Donald Trump.  Any time you allow a lunatic or a demagogue look like just another actor on the stage, he has already achieved something important.

Shakespeare knew this--"In speech, there is logic." By which he meant, just saying something makes it sound true, unless it is promptly slapped down. Parading across Shakespeare's stages were villains of every description, who the audience could see were deplorable, wicked, sometimes obviously, sometime subtly evil, and it was his genius to make the most nasty villain human, in some ways understandable, or at least recognizable. Ms. Clinton possesses by no such genius. 

To pick just one of hundreds of examples--when Donald Trump says Hillary wants to kill all the coal miners' jobs because she hates them and by the way, it's unnecessary because there is such a thing as clean coal. She can reply, "I am the coal miners' friend, not their enemy. And I'd love to embrace 'clean coal' if it were only a reality, but then again, I'd love to eat ice cream and cake and never get fat, but nobody has ever, and likely will, never figure out how to do that and we are no closer to clean coal than we are to body friendly calories. This is just another example of pie in the sky from Donald Trump. When he's not selling fantasy solutions he's dreaming up fantasy hobgoblins." 

Or words to that effect. 

And to not have a better response to the "deplorables" question is beyond comprehension? Why not simply say, "When a man says all Muslims hate us, that is deplorable. When a crowd cheers that then every last member of that crowd who cheered is equally deplorable. I still believe that. It's not just the grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan who is deplorable, it's every other person in a white sheet."

Why Ms. Clinton fails to prepare that sort of answer effectively is an imponderable. If she loses to Mr. Trump, one can only say, well there is only one person to blame.


2 comments:

  1. Au contraire Mad Dog-if Hillary loses the election she won't have, as you say, "only one person to blame"..No, no-there'll be a whole basket of vicious deplorables to point the finger at. Granted I agree Trump won the night Sunday-but only by virtue of the fact that his crass aggression convinced the rest of the GOP rats still on the boat, including the two-faced sniveling weasel he chose as his running mate, not to abandon ship- yet. That's victory in Trumpland.

    But this "success" had nothing to with Hillary, who was capable, restrained and prepared. She did as well as anyone could expect given the task: sparring with a rabid imbecile on a small stage while the world watched. Granted what the world saw is a whole other matter. Like beauty, apparently grotesque is in the eye of the beholder. Any sane viewer would have been repulsed by everything Trump did that night, from his sideshow with the women who accuse Bill Clinton of sexual misconduct, to his obvious attempt to physically intimidate Hillary on stage. That last move seems particularly stupid given the release of the damaging tape-but common sense is hard to come by in the thimble sized Trump brain. To normal folk it was apparent Donny was desperate. But Trump's bigoted, Clinton hating followers must have delighted in his insults and threats like crows tearing at fresh road kill. Can't think of anything that would deter them..

    I am with you when you say you don't understand how there can be anyone left undecided at this point-like the young Muslim woman in the debate audience-how can one be Muslim and undecided-but reportedly there are those who have yet to make up their mind. Or so they say.. Trump's performance Sunday didn't do anything to prompt new folk to join him in his tent. All he did was toss some raw meat to his vicious, depraved base and thankfully there are not enough of them to send Crazy Donny to the White House.
    Maud

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  2. Maud,

    Actually, you're right.
    As I typed "she will have only one person to blame," I had an inkling that was wrong.
    If the debate were an exam and the outcome of the election depended on passing or failing that exam, it might be true, but voters likely came to the debate already decided.
    The idea that Hillary can control things by what she says derives from the idea that Donald IS controlling things by what he says, but that's not true. He is simply calling out to the vicious and they are responding. He is not creating the vicious.

    Mad Dog

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