* For Hillary, it all began on September 5th with a 4-minute coughing jag and ended on September 11th with a complete collapse in the gutter of a city street : she was then thrown into a medical van with all the ceremony of a grocery store-clerk heaving a large sack of potatoes, and she losing her shoe in the process. You know she will be wearing a hairdo covering a small ear-piece, through which her aides will be feeding her scripted answers to the moderator’s questions. She may even get the questions in advance from upstairs at NBC. But 90 minutes, without a break, is a long slog in her rapidly worsening physical condition.
The diabolical cocktail of Faustian medication, injected and swallowed, which she is forced to undergo on a daily basis, until Election Day arrives on Nov. 8th, may not be able to keep her standing vertical or sitting upright before the clock strikes 10:30PM. She certainly won’t turn into a pumpkin but will she zone out a little here and there or pass out totally or kiss the concrete and splatter, just like Newton’s Apple, after having been dropped from a great height?
* I keep hearing that both these candidates are deeply unpopular, with roughly equal disapproval ratings. That misses an important point, which is obvious in the size and energy of their rallies. A lot of people hate Trump, but a lot of us enthusiastically support him as well, more than we have any Republican candidate in our lifetime. (I was lukewarm about Reagan.) On the other hand, most of the people who plan to vote for Hillary aren’t particularly enthusiastic about her, they just hate Trump. Hillary is just more of the same, only worse and with a vagina.
BTW, I was struck by the claim that whites “say they are tired of debating racism.” When do we ever get to debate racism, except anonymously on the internet? All we ever get to do is listen to lectures about our racism from people who hate us.
* It would be nice if some of the Alt-Right personalities could avoid, in public appearances, mentioning Nazis, Jews, “race realism” and all the other crap that undermined paleoconservatism/nationalist populism last time around. Emphasizing topics like fair trade, selective immigration, and non-interventionism is much more convincing than waving around racial IQ tables. “Alt-Right” is a terrible descriptor in the first place, so sounding like a skinhead talking-point machine doesn’t do much to persuade people.
* I’m kind of hoping for one of the train-wreck Hillarys to show up – left eye wandering around on its own Hillary; bug-eyed, yelling-too-loud “why am I not 50 points ahead” harridan Hillary; low energy, clueless-grandma Between-Two-Ferns Hillary, all culminating in a debate-ending 9-11 collapse. I’m getting my popcorn ready.
* People with negative opinions about Trump have felt perfectly free to express those opinions openly, for more than a year now. But it’s only recently that it’s been permissible to hate on Clinton.
Some combination of the stroke video, the unforced error of the Deplorables episode, and the realization that she’s no longer a sure thing has opened the door–especially on the left–to more open expressions of tooth-grinding resentment over her candidacy. That’s what I’m sensing among liberal acquaintances, at any rate.
In terms of the debate, this should be a liability for her. Clinton’s credibility has always depended on her being a kind of sacred figure (in the mainstream culture, of course). While I’m confident that the worthless “experts” will still call the debate in her favor, the phoniness of all their excuse-making for Clinton may have become too much even for the average liberal.
Most of all, hating on the “unpopular” Trump is old news, while hating on the once-sacred Clinton has the frisson of transgression liberals love so much. If she does poorly tonight, we might see the rhetorical knives come unsheathed among the liberal commentariat.
* I can’t wait for the shaking and eye-rolling and head bobbing and pant suit-wetting. I would hate, HATE, to be Hillary today. Going against the most unflappable guy in the world. Debate #1 Hillary and The Donald or Shaking and Not Stirred.
* The only way things get better for blacks in this country is if things get better for the whole working class. Race issues are entrained with economic ones affecting everyone. Rioting and BLM demonstrations do nothing to help end the shootings. By empowering the grievance it has made it worse as cops are being shot and becoming even quicker to shoot first.
HRC is detached from reality when she blames the Tulsa shooting on “systemic racism.” If anything it raises the issue of whether women should be treated identically to men in jobs requiring male attributes such as strength and testosterone. I realize we can’t have that conversation, but at least Democrats should have to acknowledge they abandoned working class issues and made it all about race and gender as party policy. The base still doesn’t quite know what happened.
HRC claims to want to unite the entire borderless world in one giant fantasy world of unlimited prosperity and happiness. Resisters are haters, but not only did no one give the US government the authority to end our nation as we know it, there is no evidence that the result will be the Coca Cola commercial variety and not be endless bloodshed and poverty all around. It’s our country, Hillary, and no one has the right to give away that which is not theirs to give.
The economic recovery under Obama is pathetic. The peace prize winner’s wars are by far the largest threat the world has faced in this millennium. Obamacare is a fine example of a government that auctions its people to profiteers. Borderless and unlimited immigration is an abuse of office that threatens our peace and freedom. And, last but not least, the free press isn’t. How can a people be free when the media is weaponized against it?
* We are all hoping that by now Hillary’s Docs have fine tuned her witch’s brew of uppers, downers (tranquilizers), cognitive enhancers, thyroid meds and anti-seizure meds so that she does not crap out in mid-debate. A seizure on stage would be ugly and in her case fugly.
* Also, the medium of television is not very kind to Hillary. It’s not what is said, its the way it looks and how its said. Let’s say you’re right, and Hillary is mopping the floor with the Donald on the details of policy. And then all of a sudden….she falls down. Or she coughs for about thirty seconds. How does that look on live television in front of 100 million people? Looks like an old decrepit woman in poor failing health. Why would undecideds vote for someone who might not last the first year of her first term? Also, Hillary isn’t the best at ad libbing or wandering off the script by making off the cuff remarks the way Trump is a master. She could easily get distracted and wander off and look foolish.
Remember: Trump had to dispose of 16 other GOP candidates in numerous live televised debates, where he was the oldest candidate on the stage. This can’t be repeated enough: He fairly easily disposed of “lower engergy” Rubio and Cruz, who are young enough to be his kids. If they couldn’t keep up with him, certainly he can handle someone like Hillary, who had fewer debates and could barely keep up with 75 yr old Sanders.
* Snopes has always had an establishment bias but that bias is more liberal establishment now.
* There are two things that are off about Hillary. The psychopathic, pathological lying bit goes back to birth. But this later bit strikes me as recent and demented. Her brain is failing her. Dementia begins generally as mild cognitive impairment. One hallmark of that and more advanced dementia is the failure to adapt to new information and respond to it appropriately, intelligently and with good judgment. Instead, you get inflexibility. Railing at the camera in this case.
A debate is one of the most open ended tests of how she will respond, and is a nightmare for both H and her handlers. Trump ought to ask her to expose her ears for the earpiece. The American public deserve more than to elect an animatronic robot.
Trump has his debating faults, but dementia is not one of them. He is extremely quick on his feet and intelligent. He comes at you in ways that are novel and unexpected. I would not like to be Hillary’s chief handler right now.
* The Democrat party and their press wing are pressing Lester Holt to “fact check” Trump live on camera Candy Crowley style. It will be interesting to see if he is a “race man” and follows their wishes. Lauer was almost crucified for NOT doing this -didn’t he get the memo from JournoList? This goes with the narrative that Trump should not be entitled to the normal courtesies as any other candidate because he is Hitler and a notorious liar and you can’t just pretend that Hitler is just another candidate or let his blatant lies go unanswered (Hillary’s lies are OK because she is lying for a good cause). The right thing from their POV would be for Holt to stand up and point to Trump and say, “I hereby denounce Trump and all his works and all his pomps and his worship and his angels and his inventions and all things that are under him. Renuntio! Renuntio! Renuntio! “. This would be Holt’s Walter Cronkite moment which would ensure for himself a place in US history.
* Yeah, she strikes me as generally coming across the way Al Gore did in his debate performances–desperately trying to find a manner that seems vaguely human, but wildly careening between being bizarrely under-energized and bizarrely intense.
It’s like she keeps failing the Turing Test, and badly. It’s just too easy to see she’s not really human.
* It appears that tedious Issues!-Issues!-Issues! analyses here overlook telegenics.
Let’s look at the history of electoral telegenics:
– Ike-Stevenson: pre-debate era, yet on TV Stevenson came across as a limp, 96-pound egghead weakling completely overshadowed by Ike’s ramrod-back solidity and supremely telegenic wide-open trademark grin
– JFK-Nixon: we’re all well-acquainted with the telegenic disparity here – only the radio audience rated Nixon on word-substance a clear victor, but the TV audience went almost totus porcus for Kennedy glam
– LBJ-Goldwater: Goldwater’s eyeglasses were overwhelmingly non-telegenic, and, in non-telegenics LBJ also held the enormous – and unique – advantage of possession of the dead JFK’s sympathy factor which Goldwater’s JFK administration outsiderhood lacked utterly
– Nixon-Humphrey: Humphrey’s baldness and his shrill, lecturing voice were not only non-telegenic, they were anti-telegenic
– Nixon-McGovern: despite his sterling WWII record, McGovern on TV came across as limp, wishy-washy
– Ford-Carter: Ford’s receding hairline, stiffness and ponderous dialect were non-telegenic, Carter’s full shock of hair, toothy smile, and honey-dripping voice were perfectly telegenic
– Carter-Reagan: Reagan was a master of visual media presentation, Carter was not, and his wan, hapless TV image in his lame “malaise” speech had already powerfully repelled voters
– Reagan-Mondale: same as for the previous election campaign – Fritz had zero telegenics)
– Bush-Dukakis: Bush’s telegenics were amiable, avuncular; Dukakis came across as a dark-browed, menacing, and skulking inept
– Bush-Clinton: Clinton’s breezy TV image beat Bush’s aging, thinning visage
– Clinton-Dole: Dole was another dark-browed face that looked bad on TV, and his running mate Kemp had zero telegenic worth
– Bush-Gore: Bush played every telegenic card in the book; Gore came across on TV as something of a wet-behind-the-ears bumbler
– Bush-Kerry: again, Bush held all the telegenic cards over the cadaverous, ponderous, lethally boring Kerry
– McCain-Obama: the young Obama was superlatively telegenic and he also played to perfection the Magic Negro upon whom white liberals love to project their fantasy of a civilized, smart black; McCain just looked ancient, desiccated
– Obama-Romney: again, the youthful-looking Obama’s telegenics beat the severe, 1950′s wethead-haircut, darker-browed, stiff Romney’s anti-telegenics
– Trump-Clinton: Mr. Trump holds all the telegenic aces; Hillary looks dumpy, ancient, flyblown, ill, tremulous-cum-animatronic, and her vocal dimension is shrill, harsh, severely nunnish, and the more makeup she wears, the more she comes visually across as being phony and held together by chewing gum and safety pins
If it’s all about telegenics, then Mr. Trump looks like tonight’s hands-down debate winner – telegenics have nothing to do with the substance of a candidate’s platform or experience, or even with what a candidate actually says (this is where the opinion of the 1960 radio audience is telling, polling Nixon as the clear winner on words spoken, not on televised image); telegenics has everything to do with how the audience feels about and responds to a televised image.
Also, Mr. Trump is bigger and taller than Hillary, and in telegenics bigger & taller count as two aces. There are reports that Hillary has asked for a footstool, concealed behind her podium, for her to stand on to make her look taller than she is and less short than Mr. Trump, so we know that Hillary’s media team understands telegenics and fears rightly that in every aspect of telegenics, Hillary is the disastrous clear loser to Mr. Trump’s superlative telegenics.
Mr. Trump is also much more animated – and far more relaxed in animation/dynamics in the camera’ eye, which forms another telegenics ace (Reagan’s ace) for him over Mrs. Clinton. Hillary on camera is stiff, scripted, almost diabolically vengeful female-Mussolini looking, like the Angel of Death, and comes across as the world’s most insufferable blowhard buddinsky mother in-law.
One thing you can bet on: from tonight’s post-debate Enemedia-Pravda’s talking head “analysts” you will hear little, if any, analysis of the two candidates relative telegenics or lack thereof – they will instead prate monotonously about race, gender, “unifying vs. dividing,” and they’ll avoid all the actual core Big Sellout issues of immigration, trade, and Invade The World. The overwhelmingly in-the-tank-for-Hillary media-”professional/expert” talking heads will avoid mention of telegenics because they know very well that in telegenics Mr. Trump holds all the aces.
