LAUERS DICE

I wasn’t expecting much out of the debate last night. Matt Lauer is a famous Clintonian and I expected him to toss Hillary nothing but softball questions. I was wrong. Matt Lauer asked tough questions and he had Hillary on her heels. She really never recovered. She spent most of her 30 minutes trying to explain why the obvious isn’t obvious. It was beyond pathetic.

Trump, on the other hand, owned the room. Lauer also asked Trump tough questions and at times he bordered on being rude. But Trump handled them brilliantly. The only chance Hillary Clinton has to win this election is to get people to believe that Trump is not up to the job and that he is too dangerous to become President. Instead people got a chance to see Trump up close and they discovered that he is very quick on his feet and more than capable of holding his own. Trump can play the game.

So how bad was it? That is easy to answer, just read the headlines. The MSM has two themes this morning. One is that Mat Lauer was sexist because he interrupted Hillary more than he did Trump. I am not even sure that was true, but if Hillary can’t stand up to Matt Lauer she sure can’t stand up to Putin. When the MSMS is reduced to playing the gender card, again, it is because they are desperate.

The other theme was that Lauer should have called Trump out on his lies specifically when Trump said he was opposed to the war in Iraq and opposed to the intervention in Libya. But if Lauer needed to challenge the candidates with regard to lies and distortions he would have had a field day with Hillary’s work of fiction. Funny thing about liberals, they consider equivocation about prior political positions to be in the same class with bald faced lies about sending and receiving classified information. Every politician, to some extent, plays more than a little fast and loose when talking about their personal history. That is unfortunate, but there is a huge difference between grandstanding and perjury.

I am still not a Trump fan and I really wish we had a better choice. But regardless of whether or not you like Trump, you have to admire the performance. I despise Hillary, so it is hard to be objective. She was smooth and relatively unflustered under pressure, but she had a difficult assignment.  It impossible to get people to trust you when the only response you have to criticism is to repeat silly talking points that don’t come close to passing the smell test. She did not look remotely capable of being  a Commander in Chief.

If you were scoring this like a fight, round one went to Trump big time. He s a brilliant counter-puncher.  It was close to a knockout. If you are a Hillary supporter, be afraid, very afraid.

TDM