It’s 9PM Eastern Time. In 24 hours Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump will face down in the third of three Presidential debates.
The first two debates have certainly been enlightening, I suppose. The electorate seems to be taking to Trump like my 12-year-old to homework, God help me, and Hillary’s team is pulling out all the stops to capitalize on it.
My fellow moderator Tom and I discussed the recent unpleasantness about the threads about the debates and decided one official one would be a good idea. That doesn’t mean you can’t start your own on side issues and such, but this is a good place to start. Let’s see that there’s no more hard feelings, shall we?
To quote a wise moderator, “we are simply in for an exciting few weeks.”
Feel free to discuss the debate and the 24 hours leading up to it here. Enjoy!
I’m a bit bummed, it appears I’ll have to miss it. Some family from out of town will be passing through and have invited us to dinner, so that takes precedence.
I have this growing fear that Donald will act… normal. Maybe even better than normal, and act presidential. He’ll apologize for… well, everything, and say something—nay, lots of things—that sounds (for him) smart and rather forward-thinking. Since so many expect him to make a chimp throwing shit look good in comparison, he’s set the bar low enough that a truly great performance will be so shocking that that’s all anyone can talk about for the next few days… which is what he desperately needs.
Despite this, I don’t think he will actually do that. Right now he’s on the defensive, attacking everyone in sight. At the debate he’ll sniff and bitch about the moderator and blame Obama, Hillary, and ISIS for everything under the sun and avoid talking about concrete policy positions (Hillary will do this too, naturally). I think both will emulate the behavior they exhibited in the second debate. Hillary will be Hillary and Donald will be less of a pig than he was in the first debate but certainly no boy scout.
I can’t wait to come home and watch it on YouTube.
Until the Secret Service grabs him and starts demanding to know who he is and what he did with the real Donald Trump.
[QUOTE=William Shakespeare, King John, Act 4, scene ii]
To gild refined gold, to paint the lily,
To throw a perfume on the violet,
To smooth the ice, or add another hue
Unto the rainbow, or with taper-light
To seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish,
Is wasteful and ridiculous excess.
You beat me to thinking about it in terms of timing before the debate. I just thought of it in terms of an excellent campaign tactic. “Stop whining” was the punchline, but the other priceless lines before that were basically about how only a paranoid idiot would try to suggest that the entire US federal election system is “rigged”. It was Obama, Mr. Calm and Mr. Cool at his best, pointing out the bleeding obvious against the ranting of a frothing-at-the-mouth gibbering lunatic.
Whether or not it deranges the lunatic, it ought to pull the rug out from under any of his debating tactics that he planned on the theme of how Hillary has “rigged” everything.
Yet it wouldn’t surprise me that his theme might be that Hillary is in on it, the President of the United States is in on it, the media is in on it, Chris Wallace and all the other moderators were in on it … everybody’s in on the anti-Trump conspiracy! At this point it’s “go for broke”.
That’s what gets me about the public perception of Hillary: Nobody knows she’s a fighter. Not in the “oh, she’s so brave, going up against all the lies” happy-clappy bullshit, but in the “she’s survived the unbridled psychotic wrath of a major political party being focused on her and is still to this day a viable candidate for President” sense. I like to imagine she’s what the Brietbart people see in their dreams, striding out of a tanker truck explosion like the goddamned Terminator, completely unscathed by the latest round of nothing they’ve tried to destroy her with.
And Trump’s idea of damage control is literally anything which would make his situation worse. It’s like he thinks “consequences” are old, wooden ships used in the Civil War. I’d say he’s Wile E. Coyote, except Wile E. usually figured out (too late) when one of his plans was about to backfire and dump a massive boulder directly on his head. Trump lacks even that much self-awareness.
So yeah, she goes hard against him. She does almost as much damage as he does to himself.
So for his reality TV stunt this time, Trump is bringing Obama’s half-brother to the debate. To throw Hillary off her game? He does know that Obama is not the candidate, right? I really don’t get this one.
This strikes me as one of the most bewildering and worst directed stunts in political history. I imagine he failed to dig up one of her disgruntled high school boyfriends, which was presumably his Plan A.
“There’s my Muslim over there. Obama’s own brother! Even he hates Crooked Hillary, I can tell you that. He knows things about them, believe me, he knows things, terrible things.”
(For the record, I have no idea if he is a Muslim).
I mean, I don’t honestly believe he’s going to do this. As I said in my first post I think he’ll behave slightly better than he did in the first debate. Like so many others I hope he self-immolates, but I doubt that he will. Not that I can think of what he could actually do to dig himself in even deeper, but then, I’ve been saying the same thing since spring. So who knows.
