The Debate Debacle

Yes, I thought it was a debacle. There was minimal respect to the moderator, a refusal to comply with time limits (and yes, I know that's not new), and a flurry of hateful and disrespectful comments. And that was only from Donald Trump. Mrs. Clinton was relatively composed. If you are fans of the musical Hamilton, she decided to take some advice from Aaron Burr and talk less, smile more. She refuted when she needed to and let Trump make a bit of a fool of himself otherwise. Now, let me be clear that I don't support either candidate at this point, nor is there a third party candidate I particularly identify with. That being said, I would rather have a president who forms coherent sentences and doesn't shout, "Call Sean Hannity," for about five minutes straight instead of answering a question. But I digress. This is meant to be about more than Donald Trump's somewhat humiliating behavior on that stage. This is about the standards by which we judge our candidates.

It should be noted that Donald Trump brought up some excellent points about Clinton's past indiscretions, while she dug into his business failures. Both focused more on discrediting the other rather than debating the issues at hand, which is why it took roughly half an hour to move on to a second question. It should also be noted that the candidates managed to be civil for about ten minutes which is quite the achievement in this election, so hats off to them both for that one. This was also the amount of time it took for Donald Trump to start in on Mexico. Trump did not even try to mask his disdain, while Hillary tried, but very quickly ended up looking like the Joker because that's about how done she was Trump, but smile more.

There were some reasonable comments from both sides. For example, both candidates agreed that certain issues need to be fixed, like the economy, race relations, and clearing ISIS out of the Middle East. However, certain candidates also believe that taking their oil is the solution to everyone's problem. It was not Hillary, in case anyone was wondering. Now, I personally can not think of a single time that trying to take the oil out of Middle East caused conflict, I mean except every time but that's besides the point. Unless we stop viewing the Middle East as a conflict filled economic investment, our relations with them will not improve. Sorry to burst that bubble, but we've been doing this for years and now that region is in pretty rough shape and plenty of the blame goes on us. Foreign policy has been a pretty major struggle in the last several year, and Secretary Clinton's actions as Secretary of State are certainly part of it. However, I can not give any support to someone who is blatantly ignoring history and is quite honestly insisting on making a mistake that has been made more than once before.

I was really going to try to by unbiased about this, but truthfully I was looking back through my Twitter feed and realized how biased I really am. I'm biased against people who happily claim that they want the best for this country, but pretty clearly only want the best for a certain group of people. I'm biased against people who think that making the same mistakes and the same offensive remarks will somehow fix the issues facing us. So yes, in the end, I trust Hillary more than I trust Donald Trump, and I don't doubt that she has her ethical issues, but she has self-control which is pretty important for a president. That and stamina, which by the way, she also has plenty of.