So Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump appeared one after the other last night for a half-hour on NBC to talk about being commander in chief. Polls will tell us who “won”; frankly, I have no idea.
But overall, America lost, big-time.
Listening to Clinton prevaricate about her emails and Trump prevaricate about positions he holds and doesn’t entirely seem to understand once again raises the unholy horror of the fact that out of 330 million people in the United States, these are the two who have ended up in the race for the White House in 2016.
NBC’s Matt Lauer was quite relentless with Clinton when it came to her handling of classified information on an unsecured private server, even going so far as to ask whether it disqualified her from the presidency.
She has tried out various approaches to this matter, from saying she made an error for which she had no excuse (a line she repeated to Lauer) to saying she did nothing wrong and had nothing to apologize for. But last night her chutzpah reached an all-time high when she pointed out there was all kinds of evidence that government servers had been hacked but no evidence her private server had been hacked.
The clear suggestion here was that Hillary Clinton had been a better steward of the classified information of the United States government than the United States government — even though she had just said it had been a mistake to set up her private server in the first place. By what logic, then, should she consider her conduct a mistake?
The simple fact of the matter is that there’s no defense for what she did, since she did it in bad faith to shield her email improperly from future public discovery — and would have succeeded had the events in Benghazi not occurred on her watch. So now she simply uses every opportunity she has to create new smoke screens simply to evade more thorough and direct questioning.
The FBI may not have indicted her, but her conduct has been so unbecoming a leader that the American people have — polls show nearly 70 percent of the American people consider her untrustworthy. She did nothing to improve on that last night, and indeed may have harmed herself further.
But at least she didn’t spend three minutes of her time sucking up to Vladimir Putin, the way Donald Trump did. Trump not only praised the Russian thug’s leadership and cited the KGB goon’s poll numbers, but appeared to draw a comparison between Putin and Barack Obama that favored Putin. I’m the opposite of an Obama fan, but that’s just disgusting. Obama hasn’t had reporters killed, hasn’t choked off press freedoms, hasn’t swallowed up Crimea, and isn’t seeking imperial dominion of America’s geographical neighbors.
Some other choice gems included this one: “Our generals have been reduced to rubble.” Even for a guy who once intimated that attempting to evade sexually transmitted diseases during the 1970s had been his own personal Vietnam, this was low.
It was said in response to a question about his claim that he knew more about ISIS than the country’s generals. After the “rubble” remark, he claimed both that he had a secret plan to defeat ISIS and that he didn’t have a secret plan to defeat ISIS. Or at least I think that’s what he said. Who knows?
Democracy, the great cynic H.L. Mencken once said, “is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” And boy, are we going to get it, one way or another, come November.