On the Iraq thing again, think about the point he’s trying to prove. It would be to demonstrate his sober judgement. Meanwhile, he’s talking about how there wouldn’t be a war if he started blowing Iranian ships out of the water for making rude gestures.
And of course, if we had just stolen all their oil then everything would be peaceful over there.
Au contraire! I found his performance to be extremely embarrassing.
I’m in Pennsylvania, and have been seeing quite a few ads. I was a bit baffled by this as well. Mostly the ones I remember are using video of mr trump himself, not anyone else saying things about him. Right now the main one seems to be mr trump talking about women with clips of women woven in.
Trump said a thing was happening, and you went looking for the thing.
Have you learned nothing?
I thought he started out smug from the get-go: “Now, in all fairness to Secretary Clinton – yes, is that OK? Good. I want you to be very happy. It’s very important to me.” :rolleyes:
Apparently the #trumpwon hashtag originated from St. Petersburg Russia
I have nothing against folks changing when new information comes to their attention, and wish it happened more often – but Trump, near as I can tell, wants to argue that he was right all along and came out against the Iraq war before it started. And, near as I can tell, “Yeah, I guess so. You know, I wish it was, I wish the first time it was done correctly” was his sole for-or-against public statement before the war started – though he followed up, months later, by refusing to pick a side either way, saying only that if Bush is going to attack, he should attack, instead of talking and talking and talking first.
And then his first public statement after the war starts is – to say that Wall Street is already reacting as if it’s “a tremendous success from a military standpoint, and I think this is really nothing compared to what you’re going to see after the war is over.”
If he wants credit for later realizing it was a mistake, that’s fine – but he doesn’t want that; he wants credit for having realized it then.
Yeah, Trump’s big mouth has put Clinton in a pretty sweet position. She can run negative ads without actually saying anything negative herself, just run the tape. She does seem to have gotten off her ass though and run a few positive ads about herself finally though.
He made a few rambling remarks that sounded to me like he was invoking his lawyers’ request. Although, I don’t understand why a lawyer would suggest such an action, since it’s not like he would be revealing anything the IRS doesn’t already know.
Who’s our designated intertubes geek? I’m not knowledgeable enough to scope this.
It’s just not who he is, though. He would have to be a different person entirely. He was trying to make something similar to the point you’re talking about. He doesn’t have the verbal intelligence to do it effectively, though. And he can’t do it unless it conforms to his ideas about himself:
For him, it isn’t as simple as saying “I wasn’t able to make that call, at the time, so I spoke without really having the information I needed, but then later I changed my mind.” It’s anathema to everything that he is. He can’t not have been right at all times. The best you’re ever going to get is him tangentially talking about what was happening while he tells you that he’s always been right. If it were any different, everything about this campaign would be different. When he reads that quote up there, I bet you he thinks, “Exactly. I was right about the war,” and it doesn’t for a second occur to him that he didn’t actually say anything, because the important point is right up front, very concrete and very simple.
It’s why he talks about his club in Palm Beach and thinks he’s talking about racial justice, and why he doesn’t bat an eye talking about how he got the birth certificate for the American people and then dropped it for more important issues right in the face of someone who is pointing out how that is manifestly untrue, and why he can say without hesitation that fucking people out of their money was a smart thing to do, even though this is a presidential debate. He does not and can not engage with these ideas the way that you’re imagining he should. He thinks about how he can be enriched by something, and then does what he thinks he needs to do to make that happen, and if you ask him about it that’s what he will tell you.
Yes. I enjoyed John Podhoretz’s postmortem (he is a conservative, BTW, and no fan of Hillary). Especially loved his quip about “the vanity and laziness that led him to think he could wing the most important 95 minutes of his life”. Spot on. It’s funny how many people thought this was misdirection from the Trump camp–that he was probably secretly preparing like mad. I never thought so, because of that very vanity and laziness.
And speaking of the Trump camp’s preparations, I’m still mystified by why the otherwise extremely canny Kellyanne Conway did the opposite of lowering expectations in the days leading up to the debate. For example, here’s what she said the day before the debate, on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos:
This is more like the kind of pregame trash talk you hear from athletes. But athletes don’t win or lose based on audiences and the media grading on a curve.
ETA: Just heard on a podcast that a reporter was heading into the spin room behind one of Trump’s spinners. He said you could tell Trump lost, unequivocally, because the spinner was slump-shouldered and muttered to himself before entering: “Okay, let’s get this the fuck over with”. LMAO
As much as I would like that to be true, apparently it is not.
You should probably look at the installed solar base in other nations. Germany has over 38 gigawatts installed capacity. “On 25 May 2012, a Saturday, solar power reached a new record with feeding 22 GW, as much as can be produced by 20 nuclear reactors, into the German power grid. This met 50% of the nation’s mid-day electricity demand on that day.” That was over four years ago, and they have 70% more solar power.
And this is freaking Germany. Is that a nation you think of for solar power?
Don’t you think that we can do the same?
Definitely not. We don’t have the area or insolance to support such levels of solar power. We’d have to be a large country with a lot of desert area.
Insolance?
Looking at Wikipedia, <7% of Germany’s power was solar generated in 2014. A one day burst is interesting but not remotely a valid argument for reliance on solar power.
The point was that the capacity is growing, and Germany is not just relying on solar, but wind too. They are depending less on oil and coal as time goes by.
I don’t see why a third possibility isn’t wholly plausible; if not likely:
He prepared, and failed.
Trump is 70 years old and has never done anything like this before. His performances in the Republican primary debates were lacklustre, but he got by by virtue of being up against a large and lousy field. His public appearances, in which he acts more or less the same way but even more agitated and aggressive, are full of Trumpists who cheer him o,n rather than people viewing him critically.
Even if he prepared for a month, why would we expect him to do well? You can’t get good at something in a short period of time. If you gave me a YEAR to practice I would not be able to defeat Serena Williams in a tennis match, or Rory McIlroy in a round of golf, or a chess grandmaster in a game of chess, and I could not beat Hillary Clinton in a televised debate, even without Trump’s baggage train. With a year of practice I would still not have the business savoire-faire of Warren Buffett. These things are very, very hard to do. Even had Trump been working his ass off I would still have expected him to perform poorly. As it was he was actually a bit worse than I expected, but within a reasonable distance of what I figured he’d do.
I do not think it at all accidental that Trump actually started out okay; it was all Trump bullshit, but he was effective at spouting his bullshit, which works because facts don’t matter all that much. So while he was saying pretty much what he had planned to say, things were fine. It was as Clinton slashed and jabbed that his performance fell apart; he had answers but seemed overwhelmed by the speed things were happening, and even his good bullets were fired at the wrong time or into the floor. (I will join a million other observers in my slack-jawed amazement that Trump didn’t make the cybersecurity portion of the debate all about ripping Clinton’s email shenanigans.) That is precisely what I would expect from an inexperienced debater who had prepared - coasting fine at the beginning and then, as the old military saying goes, your plan stops mattering when you make contact with the enemy.
Politics is hard. Trump has ridden a wave of populism to be incredibly close to the White House but guess what; a presidential TV debate is incredibly difficult to pull off. Barack Obama, of all people, got the shit kicked out of him by Mitt Romney in 2012 Debate 1. Why would you think Trump’s performance was the result of a refusal to prepare when it’s so much more simply and logically explained by the fact that he is a rookie who was up against a seasoned veteran?