Last night we had the last of the three Presidential debates between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump – although the debates were anything but Presidential – and there were a number of things that I wish Hillary could have said to the Donald, but she didn’t. These include:
- How is it possible that you keep referring to me as a liar, when every neutral and objective party who has looked at the question has determined that you are by far the most untruthful candidate who has ever run for President in the at least the last century?
- How do you dare to insinuate that my campaign manufactured the women who are now accusing you of sexual assault, as each one came forward on their own (and at great expense to their dignity) after you had callously claimed that you never did any of the acts that you talked about so cavalierly on the Billy Bush bus tape?
- How dare you claim that you have “more respect for women than anyone?” Have you taken a national or global survey in which you came out on top of everyone else? And how dare you say that when it’s now clear that you have sexually assaulted and sexually harassed dozens of women in your lifetime?
- Why don’t you answer the question about whether you would put “boots on the ground” in Iraq instead of just continuing to lie about whether you were for the Iraq war in the first place?
- If you want to continue to talk lost emails, why don’t we start talking about the 22 million emails that the Bush administration lost during the U.S. Attorney controversy? After you’ve explained that one, then you can continue to ask about my emails.
I also wish Hillary had pointed out at the debate that although she’s spent 30 years in public service, it was as the First Lady of Arkansas, the First Lady of the United States, a U.S. Senator and the Secretary of State, and that none of these are positions from which a person can make unilateral decisions. So when the Donald keeps wanting to claim that she hasn’t “done anything” in 30 years, she might want to point out to him that she wasn’t the dictator of the United States who could just decree that things be done unilaterally.
While there are things I wish Hillary would have said, Trump’s debate performances, from the first one to the last, didn’t show any improvement or grasp of the office he is running for, as pointed out by even conservative commentators like Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post. She said of Trump that has a standard approach that he has consistently applied: “interrupt and insult the opponent, complain about the moderator, provide no details, exhibit weird hand gestures, string together fragments of ideas in no particular order, praise Vladimir Putin, denigrate anyone and everyone else in public service except people who have said nice things about him, demonstrate the vocabulary of a fourth-grader, repeat lies debunked many times before and most of all deny, deny, deny your own vile rhetoric and behavior.”
I couldn’t have said it better myself.