Last Night's Debate

One good thing about belonging to a health club is that you can watch both CNN and Fox News while doing the treadmill. That enabled me today to compare how the two networks were analyzing the debate last night between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

I watched the debate myself interspersed with the Cubs- Dodgers game. The fact that the Cubs won easily  enabled me to watch more of the debate.

Most of the observers seemed to think that Trump had his best debate last night, but even conservatives cringed over his answer to Chris Wallace's question over whether he would accept the results of the election should he lose. They also  cringed over his gratuitous remark while Clinton was speaking: "Such a nasty woman". In my mind that is true, but it wasn't the time or place.

Anyway, the headline last night and today was Trump's remark over accepting the results. In his mind, I am sure he was thinking about all the garbage that is coming out about the Clinton campaign from Wikileaks and Project Veritas (the latter of which is being all but ignored by the mainstream media including our local Orange County Register). Clinton herself said she was "horrified" by his answer.

Was she horrified by Al Gore in 2000 when he and his campaign and legal team kept America waiting for five weeks to learn who our president would be? Of course not.

That's where my gym comes in. This morning, Fox was running Trump's speech today in Delaware, Ohio as he laid out his policies about the economy, border security, immigration etc. It was a good speech from a conservative point of view. CNN on the other hand, was highlighting the one part of his speech in which he explained his answer about accepting the results of the election should he lose. Their by-line ticker read, "Trump will accept results if he wins".

This, of course, was the hapless Wolf Blitzer's The Situation Room, in which his liberal panel included Gloria Borger and Dana Bash, both of whom rushed to defend Al  Gore when he didn't accept the results in Florida.

"That was different." Sure.

But Trump, while giving a pretty good performance last night, gave his enemies ammunition as if he would mobilize an army and march on the capital if he doesn't win in November. Did Trump articulate his reasoning? As usual, no. That's one thing that frustrates me about him.

I was hoping that when Hillary was lamely defending the Clinton Foundation and quoting Haiti as a shining example, Trump would have hit her with all the missing millions of dollars that went through the Clinton Foundation to rebuild Haiti after their earthquake. He could have also asked her about reports that her brother, Tony Rodham, won a gold mine deal in Haiti as part of the "reconstruction effort" by the Clinton Global Initiative.

I also wished that Trump would have thrown in something about Kathy Shelton when Hillary was prattling on about her great legal work for the  Children's Defense Fund. Shelton was the 12-year-old girl whose rapist Clinton got off while working as a lawyer in Arkansas.

Finally, I think most agree that Chris Wallace did a very good job last night and did Fox proud. He did let Trump talk over him at times, but all in all, I think it was fair and balanced.