Skip to main content

Snifflin' Donald

By



There are so many ways one could go with last night's debate that it is hard to choose.  Probably the worst thing to come out of it is that Trump has a new nickname, Snifflin' Donald, as he seemed to be battling a cold or as Howard Dean tweeted, "Notice Trump sniffing all the time.  Coke user?"  Maybe the mic had been turned up to magnify his sniffles as they became the biggest takeaway from the evening.

The Donald appeared despondent afterward, claiming his mic was defective, but viewers had very little trouble hearing him.  I guess Donald didn't like the way he sounded -- loud, harsh, off balance and often incoherent.   What little traction he found early, when he attacked Hillary on her husband signing NAFTA into law, was lost when it came to his tax returns and how to address institutional racism.  He never regained his composure, even appearing to be sulking as Hillary continued to attack him on his taxes and shady business dealings.

Hillary was calm, cool and collected throughout the night, sneaking in her jabs time and again.  It looked like Donald's head would explode.  He really appeared uncomfortable on stage, as if all this questioning was a waste of his valuable time.  He glossed over every major issue that was presented except when it came to his rehearsed attempt to deal with the birther question, falsely trying to pin the birther movement on Sidney Blumenthal and Patti Solis Doyle, both friends of Hillary.  Of course, when the birther issue has been the centerpiece of your political awakening it is pretty hard to let it go.

His performance was so bad that even Fox criticized him for not exploiting Clinton's e-mails and other faux scandals the news network had magnified during the course of the campaign.  At one point he even offered a bargain that he would release his tax returns when Hillary released her e-mails.  Hillary showed no mercy, tossing out various speculations as to why Trump hasn't released his returns including the possibility that he paid no income tax at all.  All Trump could muster in his defense, "that makes me smart."

Even though Hillary landed a lot of stinging jabs, she failed to deliver the knock-out punch.  Trump will live to see another debate.  Maybe he will prepare himself better for the next one, as I doubt Anderson Cooper will be as accommodating as Lester Holt.  More importantly, Donald needs to find better antihistamines or perhaps nasal strips to combat those nasty sniffles, or lay off the coke.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...
230 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more

The Searchers

By
You are invited to join us in a discussion of  The Searchers , a new book on John Ford's boldest Western, which cast John Wayne against type as the vengeful Ethan Edwards who spends eight years tracking down a notorious Comanche warrior, who had killed his cousins and abducted a 9 year old girl.  The film has had its fair share of detractors as well as fans over the years, but is consistently ranked in most critics'  Top Ten Greatest Films . Glenn Frankel examines the origins of the story as well as the film itself, breaking his book down into four parts.  The first two parts deal with Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah, perhaps the most famous of the 19th century abduction stories.  The short third part focuses on the author of the novel, Alan Le May, and how he came to write The Searchers. The final part is about Pappy and the Duke and the making of the film. Frankel noted that Le May researched 60+ abduction stories, fusing them together into a nar...
123 comments
Read more