By Dave Lindorff
'Debate' II was an empty exercise...because of the exclusion of Jill Stein
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The "town-meeting"-formatted "debate" between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton Sunday night was, as could have been expected, a disappointing affair, with the two moderators generally avoiding any real challenge to the lies and distortions of the two candidates and declining to push them into critical areas that have been ignored throughout this fall's presidential campaign -- like climate change, an increasingly dangerous conflict between nuclear powers that could trigger a likely nuclear world war, and the worsening income gap in the US which, let's face it, neither candidate has a program or even a desire to combat.
On balance though, while both candidates were awful, I would say the night went worse for Clinton. Trump's challenge in this second outing, coming right after the release of an 11-year-old video in which he boasted of assaulting women, was firstly to defuse that damaging revelation, and secondly to avoid losing his cool and making outrageous extemporaneous statements that would worsen his standing as a sober "leader." He largely met both challenges, apologizing for his lewd boasting and his obnoxious and abusive behavior as described in the video, which he dismissed as "locker-room talk" that he wasn't proud of, and sticking for the most part to criticisms of Clinton's actual actions (and inaction) and to her words. His performance probably was adequate to at least staunch the stream of defections of Republican candidates and Republican voters from his campaign and support base.
Clinton meanwhile, had the challenge of trying to get the public to trust her. In this she failed miserably. Smirking frequently when she was being accused of serious crimes and of blatant and repeated lying by her opponent, she clumsily tried to dodge some serious and valid charges made against her by Trump. These on-screen actions and lame efforts to change the subject will only succeed in making her less trusted by those voters who have still not made up their minds about which candidate, if any, to back on November 8.
For example, when Trump hammered at her for having deleted and then "bleached" from her hard drive over 30,000 emails -- actions taken after she had already received subpoenas for them -- she tried to dodge the issue by referring, in a complete non-sequitor, to the 50,000 emails that "I did provide." It was hardly an adequate response, and effectively simply confirmed her crime of obstruction. The two moderators, CNN's Anderson Cooper and ABC's Martha Raddatz, did nothing to press her on this failure to respond.
Clinton was even worse when it came to the matter of statements we now finally have learned she made in those secret private and highly-paid speeches she give to executives of some of the world's biggest banks -- speeches she for almost a year has stubbornly refused to make public. Portions were released over the weekend by Wikileaks which had obtained emails hacked from Clinton 2016 Campaign Chair John Podesta's email server.
Thanks to those hacked emails, we now know that Clinton told executives at Goldman Sachs, one of the felonious too-big-to-fail banks whose toxic mortgage products brought us the 2008 fiscal crisis and the resulting Great Recession that is still dragging down incomes and ruining lives in the US, speaking thusly of progressive forces inside the Democratic Party membership:
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