My brief takeaways:
- The DUMB candidate said he would appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Clinton’s emails – SERIOUSLY!?
- His pointing at her was very off-putting.
- I didn’t like the split-screen format for this. It looked odd when one candidate wandered into the screen of the other while talking.
- He followed through on his threat to seat women who have accused Bill Clinton so we are officially in the gutter.
What else?
Please share widely!
And I can’t believe some commentators said Trump stopped the bleeding. What?! He was far more unhinged and less polished in this debate, he came across as totally unqualified to be President and completely untempered. Can anyone imagine him sitting across the table from another world leader without throwing it over and leaving in a tantrum?
He didn’t apologize for his remarks, and Clinton was the only candidate who actually answered questions from audience members and made meaningful interactions with them. She should’ve shaken his hand at the start, but otherwise she performed well. “If I win you’ll be in jail” is something a banana republic caudillo says, not an American. I suspect it won’t change a damn thing, the people that really despise her will still vote for this monster no matter what he does.
She did a pretty good job of keeping her cool, which was all she could do considering the scene.
As usual she seemed overly practiced. When she quoted Michelle Obama, a very visible light went off in her head. But the answer itself was fine and about all she could say.
He was far worse though. Since he refrained from punching her or one of the moderators or an audience member, they’ll say he righted the ship. Whatever else one could say about the week he had, he certainly lowered expectations.
To give him his due, his answer on tax breaks “Why didn’t you change it? Because it benefits your friends” (to paraphrase) was a home run. His Lincoln line (which had to be off the cuff) was good too.
She mentioned presidential veto authority and could have mentioned that there are 100 Senators who all need to have their say.
She didn’t try to change it.
(She’s not the only one who didn’t, by any means.)
Clinton came out against this particular tax provision in 2007. She did try to change it when she was a senator and so her answer in the debate was accurate.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/13/washington/13cnd-clinton.html
The link shows a campaign promise. At the time she was in the Senate, and we controlled it (not enough to override a Bush veto, but still we had it).
Not much effort. Also not the biggest issue in the world … but how hard was she trying?
First you said she did not try to change it. Now you are questioning whether she tried hard enough.
Anyway, a more effective argument for her might have been to ask Donald why he and his family contributed to her reelection campaign if she was such a “disaster” in the Senate.
http://m.dailykos.com/stories/1580848
Since when does having a campaign position count as trying? She was a sitting Senator, she could have written or sponsored or even cosponsored a bill.
There were no breakthrough moments for her, and she did not meaningfully advance the cause of downballot races. (Not sure how she could have.)
She did not slay the beast or change the race last night. Haters still gonna hate, probably.
But taking a step back, I am just really impressed with how she handled herself in the face of the bizarre and threatening onslaught from Trump.
Imagine yourself on stage with this abusive and physically threatening man who attacks you and your family in the most personal terms. All the while trying to calculate the best response to a hurricane of crazy while the nation watches.
I invite you to agree with Trump about one thing: She is a fighter who never gives up.
What Hillary Clinton said was that her reference to “public and private” was a QUOTE from Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln”. Her quote was accurate.
Most importantly, it was a QUOTE. Apparently neither Donald Trump nor any of the media talking heads are able (or willing) to understand that quoting someone is different from saying the same thing yourself, that’s why we use quote marks. When Martha observes “Jimmy says pigs fly”, it is Jimmy, not Martha, who attributes aerodynamic behavior to pigs.
The media, and especially CNN, have amazingly brought this election campaign to worse than a professional wrestling match — no small feat.
What a disgusting time for America.
They wrangled Trump and fact checked him pretty good.
If she anticipated the question, and it looked like she did, all she said to say was “The attention on this quote is misplaced. I did say that, but I was quoting a movie.”
like the sick predator he is.
He is a narcissistic, misogynistic, racist and a bigoted , sociopathic, pathological liar.
There. I said it. And now I feel better.
Fred Rich LaRiccia
I’d like to remind us that name of the GOP nominee is “Donald Trump”. I’d like to ask us to please refer to him as “Donald Trump” or “Mr. Trump”. When we use references like “DUMB” or “BULLY DUMBF”, we demean ourselves and become part of the Donald Trump circus.
I wish that Ms. Clinton had continued her practice of referring to him as “Mr. Trump” or “my opponent” last night, instead of “Donald”.
I know it’s a small quibble. Still, I think our criticisms of him are far more effective when our other language does not distract from the point of the criticism. He is the playground bully (or street thug) who preys on those he views as weaker.
I’d like us to demonstrate a contrast while we demolish him with his own words.
…that when I call him the DUMB candidate, it is an acronym for Dangerous Unqualified Misogynistic Bigot, which he is in spades and I believe needs to be hammered into the American psyche with every reference to him. In fact, I’d love it if #DUMBcandidate would start trending!
Resorting to school yard taunts like “DUMB”, to me, just inviting the opposition to resort to the same behavior.
Please take Michelle Obama’s advice: “When they go low, we go high.”.
…but this is such a different race, but I can’t help, but notice that you troll Clinton so much yet come to the other guy’s defense at the slightest insult – very interesting:(
I was very impressed with Hillary Clinton’s performance last night for all the reasons others have mentioned. Through a combination of the audience questions, the tape scandal, and the commentators, the debate did not focus enough on issues. Clinton did what she could do about that, but she could not avoid answering questions about the softer issues.
Trump continually changed the subject to talk about what he wanted to talk about. I’m afraid that for the Trump-leaning and undecided audience–especially the less sophisticated viewers–he sounded FIRM and had an agenda of his own and didn’t get too complicated for them. He kept hammering home his messages about his opponent. He knows he can’t attack her smarts or experience, so he uses it against her. His messages about himself seem to be “I know how to gain and wield power,” “I know what we need to do,” and “Some important people agree with me.” His messages about her seem to be: “She has the wrong agenda, will be ineffective, is an insider who got us into this predicament (whether it’s ISIS or healthcare or something else), is untrustworthy, and may be evil.” I agree with the news commentators who say he shored up his base.
There are objective facts in the world.
Donald Trump supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq until at least 2004. That is a fact that has been confirmed by multiple sources. His claims to the contrary are objectively false. Government security agencies and professionals know that the DNC hacks were orchestrated and conducted by the Russian government. That is an objective fact.
David Gergen said, in the post-mortem of the VP Debate, that the falsity of such claims “isn’t important”. He said something to the effect that “voters don’t care very much about whether statements are true or false, they care about how competent and posed the candidate appears”.
This is, in my view, a huge contributor to our completely dysfunctional political system. We see and hear complete and utter falsehoods repeated loudly every day. Too many voters lack the ability or inclination to separate the signal from the noise. Our media do little or nothing to help.
There is, objectively, NO COMPARISON between the Clinton Foundation and Trump Foundation. None. Yet the media accompany each disclosure about the latter with a reference to the former, apparently seeking “balance”.
We live in a world that includes objective facts. The earth is more than 6,000 years old. Bill Clinton did not rape Monica Lewinsky. Climate change is not a hoax.
We live in a world with media that seems to have a very difficult time reporting that a statement just made by a candidate is simply false.
before we refer to this:
“Government security agencies and professionals know that the DNC hacks were orchestrated and conducted by the Russian government.”
as “objective fact.”
Colin Powell is not part of the teams that gathered the electronic signatures, analyzed the code fragments, identified the network paths from their origins to the targeted sites, or the human intelligence networks that confirmed these findings.
There is no doubt about who orchestrated these breaches and who is disseminating the material obtained by those breaches (emphasis mine):
I don’t know if you know what an SSL certificate is. I do. The fact that the SSL certificate is far more convincing evidence than a smoking gun, it is closer to an exact DNA match at the scene of the crime. “Metadata” is data about data, added during the breach.
Please, there is ABSOLUTELY NO DOUBT about this. I work in the identity-theft industry, my employer is the company chosen by the government to assist the tens of millions of federal employees whose information was breached last year. I have access to information about this that I cannot share, and I have to be scrupulous to refer to publicly-available sites like I’ve cited here. We can argue about the implications and argue about appropriate responses, but it is just a senseless distraction to argue about whether it happened.
The Russians hacked the DNC and other election-related sites.
told us that there was “ABSOLUTELY NO DOUBT” that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
These are very convenient charges for the people making them. I think some healthy skepticism is warranted.
Kurt Eichenwald has proof that the Russians are not only behind this, but somebody on their team was giving Trump’s team leaked information.
I reject leftists like Stein and her running mate, or my Marxist friends back in Cambridge, who insist that America is a greater threat to world peace than Vladimir Putin. America isn’t blameless when it comes to the current state of the world, but our failures are the result of our incompetence, not deliberate malice. Putin is a malice. And his preferred candidates are Donald Trump and Jill Stein.
I suppose we each have to set our own standards for credibility.
Scientists thought that stomach ulcers were caused by stress for generations. Self-serving physicians and researchers steadfastly resisted the research that showed that stomach ulcers are, in fact, caused by a readily-treatable bacterium (h. pylori). In my view, rational people do not reject all of science because science was incorrect once, such as with stomach ulcers. Science is, in fact, better at finding and correcting its own errors than any other approach we’ve invented so far.
There really is no comparison between the alleged WMDs of 2003 and the hacking of 2016. We did not have on-site inspections then. The teams I’m describing are looking at the code itself. There was, in 2003, simply nothing comparable to facts I’ve cited.
“Healthy skepticism” is all well and good. When the facts are put on the table, and EVERY rational actor who has examined them comes to the same conclusion, then rejecting that conclusion based on an emotional response to unrelated events of more than a decade ago is simply not rational.
Climate change is real. There are some self-described “skeptics” who can only be characterized as deniers — the evidence is clear, compelling, and widely published.
The evidence of Russia’s involvement with these breaches is even more compelling than the evidence supporting climate change. When a question is asked and answered, then it is no longer “skepticism” to reject the answer.
And then when Saddam called Dubya’s bluff, he pulled them out and we went to war anyway. I am continually dismayed by the willful amnesia the American public seems to have about being dragged into a war we are arguably still fighting due to falsified intelligence. Or how readily the right blames Obama for the rise of ISIS when it is Bush’s war of choice that caused the whole damn thing in the first place.
“The evidence of Russia’s involvement with these breaches is even more compelling than the evidence supporting climate change.”
The evidence for climate change is the result of decades of research and peer reviewed papers.
The evidence for who was behind this hack is nothing like that. The results were announced within hours of the release of the DNC hacks. Maybe it’s Russia, but I am skeptical that of all the hacks that go on, without any announcement of who is responsible, that this one that gets solved before the end of a news cycle.
This looks like stove piping to me, the same kind of thing that happened in 2003. Your claim that this is nothing like 2003 is laughable. The false claims of WMD’s in Iraq were not the result of lack of on-site inspections. They were the result of a deliberate attempt by the Bush administration to mislead the public for political gain. The same thing might not be happening here, but that possibility cannot be dismissed.
Using phrases like “objective facts” and “every rational actor” in a murky situation like a data hack, doesn’t reflect well on either your objectivity or your rationality.
Far from throwing climate change under the bus, I wrote that “the evidence is clear, compelling, and widely published”.
You’re simply not looking at the data. Perhaps I was unclear about my reference to WMDs. We agree that the false claims of WMDs were fabricated, precisely because there was no actual evidence to examine. In this case, there actually IS evidence. Your rant about “the end of a news cycle” is irrelevant — this information has been circulated and vetted within security circles for months.
There is nothing murky about this breach. Frankly, what it looks like to you is irrelevant, since you refuse to engage the facts in any meaningful way.
As has been observed so many times here recently, we are each entitled to our own opinions. We are not entitled to our facts.
The facts about the Russian origins of these breaches are clear. Your ranting here ignores those facts.
I offer this sub-thread as exhibit A in my assertion that the media — and at least one audience member — cannot or will not acknowledge the existence or relevance of objective fact.
I note that the arguments against me are ad-hominem.
There is literally no reference to the actual published evidence regarding the origin of these breaches. None!
I want to reiterate the issue I raise here. Somebody perpetrated these breaches. If it was not an entity associated with Russia, then it was some other entity. I have no issues with anybody who offers evidence that somebody other than Russia committed these crimes (and they were crimes). There are legitimate discussions in security circles about whether these were done by government agents pursuing a government agenda or private agents pursuing a monetary agenda.
We see none of that here. What we see instead is one comment after another attacking me.
I invite either bob-gardner or edgarthearmenian to offer specific concrete cites of evidence that these breaches were perpetrated by anybody other than entities associated with Russia (or perhaps Russian organized crime). I’m just not going to bother responding to the other hand-waving and table-thumping.
1. Information about the identity of hackers is hard to find, and easy for the hackers to disguise. At least that’s what I hear all the time in any discussion of cybersecurity. There are lots of unsolved hacks out there. Was it North Korea who hacked Sony pictures, or was it Russia?
2. The evidence you cite is weak, subject to cherry picking and group think. You can always quote a couple experts to make a claim. But that is how many experts out of a universe of how many? That is why we have peer reviewed journals to establish OBJECTIVE FACTS in the sciences. Moreover, claims made in the context of a political campaign, or in a campaign to get us involved in a war, should always be viewed with suspicion, whether you like the candidate or not. By definition, political campaigns have an agenda.
3. There are a lot of people who have grudges against the Clinton campaign and the DNC, and some of them, presumably have the capability to perform a hack of a database with poor security.
4. I have a low opinion of your credibility. As I’ve noted before, you have a history of making broad claims, supported by scanty evidence. If that’s an ad hominem attack, so be it. But you have a lot of gall to make that complaint, after labeling your comments, “eyeroll”, “whatever”, “eyeroll”, “whatever”, and then implying that anyone disagreeing with you must be in league with Trump.
I want Hillary Clinton to beat Trump, but I don’t want the price to be an increased probability of war with Russia. I think there are people who wouldn’t mind at all getting into that war. That’s what worries me, and that’s why I referenced Colin Powell and “slam dunk”. I’ve seen this sort of thing before.
What do you say about crowdstrike?
What is your response to the following assessment from motherboard:
Note that two competing cybersecurity firms came to the same conclusion.
If you have cites to cyber security experts that challenge this, then please offer them. So far, you have only waved your hands and attacked me.
If you have evidence, then I invite it. I’ve offered mine, several times, and you ignore it.
I think it supports my point.
One of a long series.
I guess you think it was some 400 lb guy in his bedroom.
It isn’t about me or what I say. It’s about facts and our willingness to look at them.
The theory that it’s all coming from Putin is a reasonable theory , just like it might have been a reasonable theory that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
But it’s a leap to claim that either was a “slam dunk”, or to say there is “ABSOLUTELY NO DOUBT”. Or, even worse, to claim that is MORE probably true than climate change.
That last assertion of yours cheapens the years of objective, scientific research on climate change.
Do you really think that the Russians are stupid enough to leave digital signatures and clues to their work. No wonder our intelligence, especially re the Russians, is so piss poor.))))
What I really think is that you have absolutely ZERO insight into what’s actually going on. I think we are in a cyber war. I think we are attacking foreign elements and they are attacking us. I see the evidence every day, it’s my job.
I think that when you accuse me of “naivete”, you simply reveal the depth of your ignorance about what is actually happening. I’m in the business, I’ve been in this business for several years now.
I frankly don’t give a shit about what your Mr. Gardner think about me or it. If either of you actually care about the facts, then I encourage you to examine the facts. So far, I see nothing from either of you but uninformed bluster and bullshit.
n/m
Fair enough. Just don’t go from what you “think” or “see the evidence” of to ‘ABSOLUTELY NO DOUBT.” See the difference?
The evidence that the breaches of the DNC and various related organizations is as clear as the evidence that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.
If you simply examine the evidence, I am confident that you’ll agree that there is “ABSOLUTELY NO DOUBT”. That’s why I wrote it that way. There is no doubt that two airplanes were flown into the WTC. There is no doubt, except among the most extreme conspiracy theorists, that those aircraft were part of an AQ attack planned and masterminded by Osama Bin Laden.
I’ve seen the evidence. I don’t think you have.
I’ll be back to say i told you so.))))
Interesting how you offer absolutely nothing to support your position. That’s because the facts are not disputed by anyone except Donald Trump those who collaborate with him.
And there it is. Tom’s argument has turned into a shibboleth. That is, if you don’t agree with what Tom says, you’re part of “them”. The only people who disputed the existence of Saddam’s WMD’s, it was said, were people who hated America, like the French, who might even be on Saddam’s side. Because it was a “slam dunk”; there was/is “ABSOLUTELY NO DOUBT”.
“Anyone can see the facts,” Bush/Cheney et al said. “Besides, we have access to secret information that you don’t, and that information proves that we’re right. Why, just look at this aerial photography/computer code. Whose side are you on?'”
Tom, the more you claim that this time it is different, the more you sound just like them.
Remember when you were sitting on your 7th floor balcony and you saw that rent control didn’t work, because you could see fires?
Is it so hard to simply say “I haven’t seen the data, I actually don’t know”?
You don’t know what you’re talking about. I gave you the link, it appears you haven’t read it — you’d rather attack me.
I note that neither you nor edgarthearmenian make any attempt to engage the facts, and instead attack me.
I think it’s with our intelligence agencies which seem pretty confident about the Russian connection.
And why do we actually believe our so-called intelligence agencies?
He was mocked locally by Margery Egan for not remembering how many troops were in the army, attacked for his scream by the likes of Tim Russert and driven out of the race by late night comedians. And the other gaffe he committed has been proven true in hindsight, taking out Saddam has made America and the world far less safer, and it’s not even clear how much it helped the people of Iraq.
For a man so mistreated by his own party and the media and so vindicated by reality, he still comes across as humble and even a little contrite in the PBS special that revisited his campaign. I would be so bitter and angry.
… and has a loud, ongoing voice in the party. A better fate than most candidates who never won a primary or a caucus.
Not knocking Dean, I like him.