Miserably Biased Lester Holt on Trump Clinton Debate

JoyInTheMorning

Wed, Sep 28 2016, 1:52 pm

I'm surprised that Trump supporters aren't seriously worried by his lack of coherence. I really do think he is in the early stages of dementia.

If you want to get a sense of his incoherence, read this excellent article in Vox: http://www.vox.com/policy-and-.....ebate .

I've quoted part of it below, where Trump's answer on cybersecurity is compared to Clinton's.
Trump on cybersecurity:

Quote:

As far as the cyber, I agree to parts of what Secretary Clinton said, we should be better than anybody else, and perhaps we're not. I don't know if we know it was Russia who broke into the DNC.

She's saying Russia, Russia, Russia. Maybe it was. It could also be China, it could be someone sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds. You don't know who broke into DNC, but what did we learn? We learn that Bernie Sanders was taken advantage of by your people. By Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

Look what happened to her. But Bernie Sanders was taken advantage of. Now, whether that was Russia, whether that was China, whether it was another country, we don't know, because the truth is, under President Obama we've lost control of things that we used to have control over. We came in with an internet, we came up with the internet.

And I think Secretary Clinton and myself would agree very much, when you look at what ISIS is doing with the internet, they're beating us at our own game. ISIS. So we have to get very, very tough on cyber and cyber warfare. It is a, it is a huge problem.

I have a son. He's 10 years old. He has computers. He is so good with these computers, it's unbelievable. The security aspect of cyber is very, very tough. And maybe it's hardly doable. But I will say, we are not doing the job we should be doing, but that's true throughout our whole governmental society. We have so many things that we have to do better, Lester, and certainly cyber is one of them.

Here's what Clinton said:

Quote:

I think cybersecurity, cyber warfare will be one of the greatest challenges facing the next president, because clearly we're facing, at this point, two different kinds adversaries. There are the independent hacking groups that do it mostly for commercial reasons to try to steal information that they then can use to make money. But increasingly, we are seeing cyberattacks coming from states.

The most recent and troubling of these has been Russia. There's no doubt now that Russia has used cyberattacks against all kinds of organizations in our country, and I am deeply concerned about this. I know Donald been very praiseworthy of Vladimir Putin.

But Putin is playing a very tough, long game here. And one of the things he's done is to let loose cyberattackers to hack into government files, to personal files, the Democratic National Committee. And we recently learned that this is one of their preferred methods of trying to wreak havoc and collect information. We need to make it very clear, whether it's Russia, China, Iran, or anybody else, the United States has much greater capacity.

And we are not going to sit idly by and permit state actors to go after our information, our private sector information or our public sector information, and we're going to have to make it clear that we don't want to use the kinds of tools that we have. We don't want to engage in a different kind of warfare. But we will defend the citizens of this country, and the Russians need to understand that.

Who do you want negotiating with foreign countries? Someone who can't put together a paragraph or someone who can speak logically and coherently?

Do you really want someone who can't think through the end of a sentence clearly deciding when we'll go to war?

For me the choice is between sanity and insanity. Clinton is sane; Trump is insane. I choose to have someone sane at the helm of our country.

JoyInTheMorning

Wed, Sep 28 2016, 1:55 pm

Here's another example of Trump babbling. And this was in the part of the debate where he supposedly did well! Below, Trump is defending his proposal to cut taxes on the rich It's hard to find sentences that would pass muster in lower school.

Quote:

They are going to expand their companies and do a tremendous job. I'm getting rid of the great thing for the wealthy, it's a great thing for the middle class and for companies to expand and when these people are going to put billions and billions of dollars into companies and when they are going to bring $2.5 trillion back from overseas where they can't bring the money back because politicians like Secretary Clinton won't allow them to bring the money back because the taxes are so onerous and the bureaucratic red tape, it's so bad.

So what they are doing is leaving our country and, believe it or not, they are leaving because taxes are too high and because some of them have lots of money outside of our country and instead of bringing it back and putting the money to work because they can't work out a deal and everybody agrees it should be brought back, instead of that, they are leaving our country to get their money because they can't bring their money back into our country because of bureaucratic red tape, because they can't get together. Because we have a president that can't sit them around a table and get them to approve something, and here's the thing, Republicans and Democrats agree that this should be done. $2.5 trillion.

I happen to think it's double that. It's probably $5 trillion that we can't bring into our country, Lester, and with a little leadership, you'd get it in here very quickly and it could be put to use on the inner cities and lots of other things, and it would be beautiful. But we have no leadership. And honestly, that starts with Secretary Clinton.

Fox

Wed, Sep 28 2016, 2:11 pm

JoyInTheMorning wrote:

Here's what Clinton said:

Quote:

Who do you want negotiating with foreign countries? Someone who can't put together a paragraph or someone who can speak logically and coherently?

This is precisely why the election is so close. Clinton says absolutely nothing in the above quote. In fact, she says less than Trump, which takes a bit of doing.

Trump's meandering answer brings out the fact that there are multiple threats -- from governments, people in their basements, and his ten-year-old son. Clinton seems determined to make this about Russia. There is no doubt that Russia is very active in hacking, but she's wrong to put so much focus on it.

And am I to understand that she's threatening military action unless Russia stops its hackers? I have a better idea: how about using secured servers and actually taking the advice of your IT experts? That won't stop all hackers, but it won't end with your IT guy taking the Fifth, either.

Fox

Wed, Sep 28 2016, 2:25 pm

chaiz wrote:

No, Turing.
I do not think people who make it financially should be role models just because. I am surprised that you think he is so amazing just because he is such a smart investor.

He didn't take over Turing; he started the company.

I don't admire him because he's a smart investor; I admire him because he's handled himself pretty well after getting a raw deal from the media for doing something that is literally an everyday occurrence in the pharmaceutical world. A lot of the bad press was his own fault: he was immature and obnoxious, and he made a great poster boy for people's anger over health care costs. However, he's used it to try to grow, and I admire that.

After I learned about how the pharmaceutical investment world works, it became clear that he didn't do anything that wasn't business-as-usual -- as we see from the subsequent Epi-Pen brouhaha.

What I really hate is the fact that the vast majority of media accounts dumb down the story to create easy heroes and villains. There's plenty of criticize in how meds come to market, but blaming the whole system on one 30-year-old kid is just wrong.

chaiz

Wed, Sep 28 2016, 3:09 pm

Fox wrote:

You are right he started Turing. He bought the drug that he then overpriced. I am not sure that just because the pharmaceutical industry is rife with ethical issues he is a tzaddik. And there are degrees. And Mylan's CEO is also in the hot seat for good reason. Let us not turn the CEOs into heroes and victims here.

Jeanette

Wed, Sep 28 2016, 4:16 pm

Fox wrote:

Funny how whenever there's a particularly egregious example of greed by trump or his cronies, the response is, "what do you expect? That's business." This s a guy running on a platform of change. Is this how you expect to make America great (again)? Great for whom? Somehow I don't have a lot of faith in trump having the interests of the middle class in mind. We'd be idiots to give this guy power, and in fact he's counting on our idiocy.

Shipping jobs overseas is also good business when you can pay workers pennies on the dollar. Ditto hiring illegals.

Jeanette

Wed, Sep 28 2016, 4:37 pm

Fox wrote:

It's only on his radar in the most general sense. However, it is most definitely on the radar of people he surrounds himself with. Peter Thiel started battling the academic powers-that-be as an undergrad at Stanford and has written extensively about it.

Trump's college-age supporters are absolutely rabid on the topic, and they will be the interns and worker-bees who will be groomed for future leadership roles during a Trump presidency. Within 20 years, they will be in positions to actually restore the idea of classical liberal education in universities.

I keep hearing this business about Trump being a blank screen on which people can project their pet ideas, but the only place I hear it is on Imamother. As I said upthread, I don't think the candidates will respond significantly differently to governance issues. The difference is in the tone each one sets and the message that the government sends to citizens.

A perfect example is today's news about the DOL lawsuit against Palantir Technologies. It seems that 44 percent of their new hires were Asian-American. But since 73 percent of the applicants were Asian-American, the DOL is alleging racial discrimination. Even leftist legal scholars agree that it's basically a nuisance lawsuit that gives every appearance of being politically motivated. The message that it sends to business is that you can't win -- somehow you will run afoul of identity politics and be branded a racist. It seems to me to be a particularly stupid message to send to Silicon Valley, where support for Clinton is very deep. But the tone and implied threat is unmistakable.

I fail to see how this response has anything to do with trump. Can't Peter thiel and this young up-and-coming army of academic reformers keep fighting the good fight regardless of who's in office?

I agree that in many ways we are overdue for a national conversation on issues like gender identity and the welfare state without being accused of racism, sexism or homophobia. But trump is not furthering the conversation. He doesn't just violate pc norms, he violates norms of mentchlichkeit and decency. I'm all for intelligent discussion but I have no hankering for the good old days when it was okay to make rude, sexist or racist comments in public, when it was okay to mock the disabled. I don't think being a minority or disabled or a woman makes you immune to criticism. But you criticize the person, their ideas, not their race, relations or disability which they have no control over. I thought we as a country already understood that but I guess trump wants us to unlearn all that.

SixOfWands

Wed, Sep 28 2016, 5:02 pm

Jeanette wrote:

At a November campaign rally in Alabama, Trump supporters physically attacked an African-American protester after the man began chanting “Black lives matter.” Video of the incident shows the assailants kicking the man after he has already fallen to the ground.

The following day, Trump implied that the attackers were justified. “Maybe [the protester] should have been roughed up,” he mused. “It was absolutely disgusting what he was doing.”

Two brothers arrested in Boston last summer for beating up a homeless Latino man cited Trump’s anti-immigrant message when explaining why they did it. “Donald Trump was right — all these illegals need to be deported,” one of the men reportedly told police officers.

Trump did not even bother to distance himself from them. Instead, he suggested that the men were well-intentioned and had simply gotten carried away. “I will say that people who are following me are very passionate,” Trump said. “They love this country and they want this country to be great again. They are passionate.”

At a rally, he pointed out an African American man, saying “look at my African American over here.” He's also told Fox News’ Jeanine Pirro that blacks in America have “no health care, no education, no anything.” He described the lives of African-Americans as “a total catastrophe.” (I attended a predominantly black high school. I guess I have "no education, no anything" either.) Also, from a 1991 book

(Trump called O’Donnell a disgruntled employee, but he initially did not dispute the remarks. “The stuff O’Donnell wrote about me is probably true,” he told Playboy in an interview published in May 1997. Two years later, however, he told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that O’Donnell’s account was fiction. “He made up this quote. I’ve heard the quote before, and it’s nonsense,” Trump said. “I’ve never said anything like it, ever.”)

Just a sampling.

SixOfWands

Wed, Sep 28 2016, 5:15 pm

Snickers18 wrote:

Then again, look at all the people who comment on Trump's orange face. Or the people who applauded the erecti0n of naked Donald statues in various locations. I am no Trump fan, but I do believe in consistency - if you are anti- body/fat/appearance shaming, then be disgusted by it across the board, no matter which candidate it's directed at.

(Yes, I have found DT's comments on others' appearances to be be unsettling at best.)

There's a real problem in our society that women are expected to smile. Be pretty. Not too loud, etc. Sexism, pure and simple. And that's what people were talking about with Clinton. There's an entire article about how she had to avoid resting bee-yotch face, and had to look pleasant. Nothing about Trump, who smirked the entire debate.

But I'm not worried about them, or about people making jokes about Trump's orange pallor. Or not that worried. They're all offensive.

I'm worried about what TRUMP says.

About Carly Fiorina:

Quote:

"Look at that face!" he cries. "Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?!" The laughter grows halting and faint behind him. "I mean, she's a woman, and I'm not s'posedta say bad things, but really, folks, come on. Are we serious?"

Rosie O'Donnell

"I think everyone can agree Rosie O'Donnell deserved to be called a fat pig"

Megyn Kelly

He called Megyn Kelly a "bimbo" and suggested it was because she was menstruating ("You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever").

Heidi Cruz

His insulting tweet about Heidi Cruz