The Great Divide
“Name-calling does nothing to improve understanding or move the political debate forward.” — Mark McKinnon, American political adviser, commentator It’s human nature to want to pick a winner in any contest, but it’s hard to judge a debate when the two participants were speaking different languages.
Well, the last episode of “The Donald and Hillary Show” has aired and I’m still shaking my head and thinking, what the heck was that?
It’s human nature to want to pick a winner in any contest, but it’s hard to judge a debate when the two participants were speaking different languages.
Clinton projected calm logic for the most part, except when she was unable to suppress a grin during moments of particularly potent bluster from her opponent.
Trump went for the throwaway lines, the sound bites — bits of bravado and bumptiousness easily translated and repeated on Twitter, with his talk of bad hombres and drug lords, Clinton’s support for babies being ripped out of their heartless mothers’ wombs just a day or two before birth, the rigged election and the fact that Clinton is a liar and a nasty woman.
You couldn’t envy moderator Chris Wallace of Fox News. He asked probing questions and tried his best to keep both presidential candidates on track, but Clinton still managed to slickly sidestep a few sticky subjects — contribution controversies with the Clinton foundation, the skeletons in Bill’s closet — while Trump often simply ignored the questions.
And sometimes Wallace seemed to get lost in the harangue and simply gave up on the follow-up.
Case in point (and, regrettably, there were many): when asked why so many women have come forward recently to recount episodes of Trump’s sexually predatory behaviour, Trump insisted they had all been paid to say such things by the Clinton camp. Then he claimed that several of their stories have been debunked, without providing any evidence to back that up.
When he trotted out his threadbare mantra “nobody has more respect for women than I do,” some audience members openly laughed.
But any laughter at Trump’s one-liners and outrageous statements has to be tempered by the realization that this man, who twists the truth to suit his own ends, could conceivably wield more power than anyone else on the planet should he win the presidency.
Do Americans really want Trump involved in international affairs? Here’s his Coles Notes take on Iraq’s current efforts to recapture the city of Mosul, in which he blames Clinton for ISIS’s incursion into that city and asserts that military manoeuvres there are all just to boost the Clinton campaign:
“Let me tell you, Mosul is so sad. We had Mosul. But when she left, she took everybody out, we lost Mosul. Now we’re (fighting) again to get Mosul. The problem with Mosul and what they wanted to do is they wanted to get the leaders
of ISIS who they felt were in Mosul. About three months ago, I started reading that they want to get the leaders. And they’re going to attack Mosul. Whatever happened to the element of surprise? … So we’re now fighting for Mosul that we had. … And the only reason they did it is because she is running for the office of president, and they want to look tough. They want to look good.”
Keep in mind that this is the person Americans could choose to run their country.
Fred Kaplan, writing for Slate.com just after the debate, says Trump’s puerile
political theories are preposterous.
“This is parochialism raised (or lowered) to a new level,” Kaplan wrote. “If Trump really believes that the Iraqi government, the Kurds, Sunni tribesmen, and Shiite militias have gone to the immense trouble, and taken the near-unprecedented step, of fighting for the same goal in a co-ordinated operation — something that hasn’t happened since ISIS took Mosul, as its first great gain, two years ago — then he knows nothing about the Middle East, nothing about the struggles of coalition warfare, nothing about global
or regional politics, nothing about war.”
That’s a very frightening thought.
After the debate, when all was said and done and the TV cameras were turned off, it was very hard to find any winners in that divisive discourse, in an America that seems fractured by differences rather than united by a common vision.
And unfortunately, this is so much more than a game.
After the debate, when all was said and done and the TV cameras were turned off, it was very hard to find any winners in that divisive discourse, in an America that seems fractured by differences rather than united by a common vision.