Debating Two Against One

Hillary did a really nice job in the Hofstra debate - maybe better than that.  Good for her.   ‎

‎

And while I'm not suggesting that a fair fight would've been any different, it is quite something that Mr. Trump in these things is essentially fighting a two-against-one fight.   There were three notable and incredibly inappropriate run-ins with the supposedly sage and impartial Lester "Candy" Holt, as follows:

‎

1.  Stop-and-Frisk.  Holt asserted that the policy was held to be unconstitutional.   In fact, it was held unconstitutional by an activist and discredited judge in a decision that was angrily reversed by the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit; after which Mayor di Blasio chose not to protect the City's options by abandoning the case.  Trump completely and accurately explained all that, but appeared to be arguing with some kind of deux-ex-machina Voice of Reason, who turned out to be an ignorant shill for a specific agenda. ‎

‎

2.  The Iraq War.  T‎rump has always been against the Iraq war, and in fact has strongly criticized Pres. (W.) Bush for the effort, to the consternation of many Republicans.  There is a single one-second throw-away line in a Howard Stern interview where, if one wanted to magnify the significance of that moment out of all conceivable rational proportion, it can be argued that there was a stand-alone statement of some vacillation.  Putting aside completely the proper resolution of that argument, Trump obviously should not have had to debate the point with the supposed . . . moderator.  ‎

‎

3.  The Birther Controversy.  There is legitimate controversy surrounding who promoted the birther controversy, with one possibility being the '08 Clinton campaign against Obama.  The issue is a complicated and nuanced one, and the small point here is that it's not up to the . . . moderator . . . to debate (yes, debate!) the point

So, at least in part, the moderator let his own views get the better of him and decided to go two-on-one against Trump with the other presidential candidate - on issues where he was somewhere between flat-out wrong or clearly uneducated, and was, at an absolute minimum, not right.  The words "shut up" come to mind.   ‎

Two more of these left to go.  Wow - I'm exhausted already.  I need a 400-pound hacker to fix the messaging.  

Onwards . . . ‎