Post Debate at Clinton.com

I broke my long standing rule of never, well hardly ever, watching politicians give speeches and debates. It was amusing and irritating at times. I guess Ace covers my feelings pretty well in his Post-Debate Thread: Final Thoughts

Trump made lots of errors -- I can't believe he brought up taking the oil again, for example -- but Hillary's goal here was to disqualify him.

What did she do? She painted him like every other Republican gets painted in a debate. She did not succeed in extraordinizing him -- making him an extraordinary threat the Republican can not bear.

By repeating the same sorts of attacks lodged at every Republican -- wants to cut taxes, "racist," etc. -- she actually ordinized him.

Trump's demeanor was generally strong and calm. He got rattled a few times. He looked pissy when she was dropping her programmed attack modules on him.

But by and large, he kept it together.

Was he good? No. He wasn't sharp. I know people's jaws were falling open when Trump failed to pounce on her for daring to bring up emails, disclosures, and cybersecurity. He was meh.

Hillary delivered the exact same message that all of her ads are playing around the clock. The viewer really got no new information on that front.

On the other hand, Trump stood up at the podium and kept to his basic message without melting down. (Well, except that "take their oil" like.)

Her goal was to disqualify him; his goal was to seem like an ordinary Republican. Or, at least, ordinary enough to not seem scary (while attempting to seem like a big change agent).

Neither did a very good job. But Trump did a slightly better job at is job than she did at hers.

Stacy McCain generally agrees: No, Donald Trump Won the Debate

What was Trump’s basic challenge going into the debate? That he was “not presidential,” without the necessary standing to challenge an experienced politician like Hillary. And yet there he was, side-by-side on stage with her, clearly unintimidated by her.

Did he score any knockout blows? No. Did he persuade any liberals? No. But no one could have reasonably expected such an outcome. Trump committed no great gaffes or blunders, he evaded moderator Lester Holt’s “gotcha” questions and, if at times Trump was “not presidential,” he was not so un-presidential as to disqualify himself in the eyes of any voter who prior to Monday night had considered voting for Trump.

Ross Douthat makes some apt criticism of Trump’s debate performance, but it’s not Harvard-educated pundits who are Trump’s core constituency. This is one of the basic problems with political punditry: Highly educated (and highly ideological) commentators have difficulty imagining how things look to the average voter in Ohio or Florida. Remember how the Bernie Sanders boom during the Democrat primaries caught much of the journalistic world by surprise, in much the same way that Trump’s success in the GOP primaries shocked professional pundits on the Right.

My take? Could have been better, could have been worse, but not bad considering he was debating against two, as Lester Holt appeared to have drunk the kool-aid, and decided to intervene repeatedly on Hillary's behalf. Lester Holt learned the ‘Matt Lauer Lesson’  and Lester Holt: The Third Debater?

The game of two-on-one saw Holt ask no questions about:

• Hillary’s emails
• Benghazi
• The Clinton Foundation

While ignoring these issues, Holt grilled Trump on stop-and-frisk, the birther story, his comments about women, his many bankruptcies, why he hasn’t released his tax returns — and a host of other issues the media sees as unfriendly to the Republican candidate.

In debate, Clinton gets no follow-up questions, Trump gets 6. I think Donald did a decent job of rebutting Lester's attempt to fact check him on when he became anti-Iraq war, but he got a little hot and dwelt on it too long. As Dana Perino on Fox pointed out, he wasn't a Senator, and didn't have access to any secrets the way former first Lady and Senator Clinton did when she made the same "error" (I won't concede that point). At least he didn't sit by quietly as Lester "Candy Crowlied" him.  12 Hillary Lies Debunked that Lester Holt let slide. Neil Cavuto helps Trump prove he did NOT support the Iraq war – whips out 2003 clip!



Cuban Admits He Lied About Front Row Seat; Wanted To Get Under Trump’s Skin. Not much was said about the front row seats last night, although I believe Hillary made one reference to a woman who she claimed was a Trump "victim" at some point. Despite the name, Cuban is Russian, BTW.

Well, duh: Clinton email server broke government rules, watchdog finds

Hillary Clinton broke government rules by using a private email server without approval for her work as U.S. secretary of state, an internal government watchdog said on Wednesday.

The long-awaited report by the State Department inspector general was the first official audit of the controversial arrangement to be made public. It was highly critical of Clinton's use of a server in her home, and immediately fueled Republican attacks on Clinton, the Democratic front-runner in an already acrimonious presidential race.

The report, which also found problems in department record-keeping practices before Clinton's tenure, undermined Clinton's earlier defenses of her emails, likely adding to Democratic anxieties about public perceptions of the candidate. A majority of voters say Clinton is dishonest, according to multiple polls.

The report concluded that Clinton would not have been allowed to use the server in her home had she asked the department officials in charge of information security. The report said that staff who later raised concerns were told to keep quiet. Several suspected hacking attempts in 2011 were never reported to department information security officials, in breach of department rules, it said.

Nothing new here, but it's good (and somewhat amazing) to see the State Dept. acknowledge it.

Former Federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy is still hot about the fact that Obama was found to be emailing Hillary at her super secure basement email server under an alias, and thinks that explains why the James Comey let her off the hook: Obama’s Conflict Tanked the Clinton E-mail Investigation — As Predicted

. . .Indeed, imagine what would have happened had Clinton been indicted. The White House would have attempted to maintain the secrecy of the Obama-Clinton e-mails (under Obama’s invocation of a bogus “presidential communications” privilege), but Clinton’s defense lawyers would have demanded the disclosure of the e-mails in order to show that Obama had engaged in the same misconduct, yet only she, not he, was being prosecuted. And as most experienced criminal-law lawyers understand (especially if they’ve read a little Supreme Court case known as United States v. Nixon), it is an argument that Clinton’s lawyers would have won.

In fact, in any other case — i.e., in a case that involved any other unindicted co-conspirator — it would be the Justice Department itself introducing the Obama-Clinton e-mails into evidence.

As noted above, the FBI told Huma Abedin that the name she did not recognize in the e-mail with Clinton was an Obama alias. For the agents to do this ran afoul of investigative protocols. The point of an FBI interview is for the interviewee to provide information to the investigators, not the other way around. If agents give information to potential witnesses, the government gets accused of trumping up the case.

But of course, that’s only a problem if there is actually going to be a case.

Cheryl Mills makes another nefarious appearance: FBI: Clinton aide asked Pagliano for information on “wiping” servers, and not with a cloth

Hillary Clinton’s State Department chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, asked Clinton’s email server technician, Bryan Pagliano, about “wiping computer data,” new FBI documents reveal.

According to notes released by the FBI on Friday, Pagliano also told investigators during his Dec. 22 interview that Mills, who now serves as Clinton’s attorney, dismissed concerns he raised in 2009 or 2010 about the then-secretary of state’s use of a personal email server.

The bombshell revelations comes just hours after news broke that the Justice Department granted Mills immunity in exchange for her cooperation with the FBI’s email probe.

Watch as Hillary's Mook attempts to talk around a Platt River employee reference to the "Clinton cover up" in an email:



Hillary and the dishonesty of "Environmental Racism": New Leftist Meme: Blame Urban Riots on ‘Environmental Racism’, But Hillary would like the DOJ and the EPA to help end both, through more . . . regulation. The left has a couple of nail, "racism", and "environmentalism", and only one hammer, more federal governmental control over our lives to hit them with. If Hillary wants to stop fracking somebody should tell the voters in Ohio. There's still time.

Ann Althouse caught Hillary Clinton's unchallenged, illogical statement about private prisons.

Government prosecutes criminals and obtains convictions and prison sentences. If government uses privately run prisons, it must pay these private businesses to house its prisoners. The entity filling the prison therefore has an economic incentive against putting more people in prison. The private business — the one with the "profit motivation" — has no power to create more prisoners. I can see opposing private prisons for other reasons, but Hillary's justification made no sense to me other than a random expression of disgust for business.

The National Review sees Hillary As an Embodiment of the Left’s Disdain for Democracy.

From Wombat-socho's "In The Mailbox: 09.26.16", Brutal New Trump Ad Uses Hillary To Mock Hillary, Corrupt Judge Rules to Keep Hillary E-Mails Hidden From Voters Until After Election, The Mark Of Soros – Charlotte, NC., John Ruberry – Why Trump Will Win Tonight’s Debate, “Mostly True” When Bernie Said It, “Mostly False” When Trump Says It, Glenn Kessler Indicates Why Moderators Shouldn’t “Fact Check”, Trump Receives First Ever ICE Endorsement,