**Written by Doug Powers
The debate open thread is reaching the “fill to here” line with comments, so another area for post-debate forensics is in order.
The evening got off to a friendly enough start:
As for the debate itself, there were three different times I laughed out loud, all courtesy of Hillary Clinton. First up:
She wondered whether Trump isn’t as rich as he says, does not contribute as much to charity as he says, or possibly owes money to Wall Street and foreign banks.
“It must be something really important, even terrible that he’s trying to hide,” said Clinton.
The stillness of the Chappaqua evening air is to this day occasionally interrupted by the eerie echo of hammer-on-Blackberry, so that’s some kind of accusation coming from Queen BleachBit.
Clinton also said that as president she’d call for a special prosecutor and hold people accountable. No, seriously:
And because I hold the same standards as I look at all of these trade deals. But let’s not assume that trade is the only challenge we have in the economy. I think it is a part of it and I’ve said what I’m going to do. I’m going to have a special prosecutor. We’re going to enforce the trade deals we have and we’re going to hold people accountable.
In other words, there’s no way Hillary Clinton is going to tolerate somebody like Hillary Clinton working in her administration!
Hillary jaw-dropper number three: She seemed to think that saying all cops are racist would be painting with too broad a brush, but she found a way around that:
Clinton made clear her willingness to take the baton from Obama and continue to lead America down the path of racial healing:
When talking about race-relations in the country, and the shootings of black men by police officers, debate moderator Lester Holt asked Mrs. Clinton: “Last week you said that we have to do everything possible to improve policing to go right at implicit bias. Do you believe police are implicitly biased against black people?
Mrs. Clinton replied: “I think implicit bias is a problem for everyone, not just police. I think unfortunately too many of us in our great country jump to conclusions about each other and therefore I think we need all of us to be asked the hard questions ‘why am I feeling this way?’”
At the next debate Clinton will detail her plan to eliminate the unemployment problem by having the government hire and train millions of people to work as Implicit Bias Training Facilitators to head up classes that will be mandatory for everybody who can’t or won’t pony up a donation to the Foundation.
As for Trump, I cringed a little when he agreed with Clinton that people on “terrorist watch lists” should be denied the right to own guns. He should have, A) Exposed the fallacy by pointing out that none of the recent attacks have been perpetrated by anybody on a watch list so it wouldn’t have made any difference; B) Reminded Clinton that recent attacks have been with bombs and knives; C) Pointed out the arbitrary and flawed nature of government “lists” and D) Reminded her that the man who put an end to the St. Cloud attack and saved lives is an NRA-certified firearms instructor who owns a shooting range.
At the next debate, Trump also needs to expand in a more effective fashion when Hillary calls her email games a “mistake” — hey, what high-level government official hasn’t “accidentally” put an email server in his or her basement to skirt the Federal Records Act? And they never even touched on Benghazi or Hillary’s “pay to play” schemes, but that’s partly the fault of a moderator who was unwilling to take the conversation in that direction.
**Written by Doug Powers
Twitter @ThePowersThatBe
