You got what you deserve, Republican Party...

[A Black Falcon]

The third debate saw the most actual policy discussion of the three debates. Trump was actually looking like an actual debater for the better part of the first half... a junior-grade one being asked the easier questions while Hillary gets hit with tougher stuff. That does reflect their respective competence levels, but it makes it easier for Trump to look like he can answer questions. Of course he mostly failed to answer those questions decently, but it could have helped if he was slightly less out of his depth. But while he definitely was hard on Hillary, I should say that for a debate hosted by a Fox News guy, Chris Wallace, it was better than I expected; there wasn't even a question about Benghazi, amazingly enough! There were some about emails, but Hillary did what she could to focus on attacking Trump for not admitting that Russia was behind the hacking and attack him for his comments about Putin, and Wallace did go at him for that. Any emails questions are going to be tough for Hillary, but that went about as well as such a segment could I think.

The big news this debate, though, was that Trump doubled down on one of his many incredibly dangerous lies, his refusal to say that he will accept the results of the election. Wallace directly asked him about this, multiple times, in an attempt to get him to say he will accept the results... and he refused. Specifically, he said that he won't give an an answer to the question now; he'll say whether he accepts the results after the election. And it's easy to see what he means by that, he'll accept it if he wins and not if he loses. I know the press has made this point, but it really is a dangerous thing for democracy if a significant number of people actually start believing that lie! It's very sad that he's goading them on on this with dangerous lies.


But it's not only Trump. Mitch McConnell and other top Republicans (McCain as well has said this, apparently) have said that they think that they might not allow ANY vote on ANY Democratic Supreme Court nominee if they hold the Senate after this election. They have already stonewalled this for an unprecedented length of time, but saying "we are going to abrogate our constitutional duty to provide any advice and consent on judicial nominees if the other party nominates those people" is utterly disgusting, and also an incredibly dangerous sign for our democracy. You need to have TWO functioning parties to have a democracy, not only one! And between Trump and their Congressional obstruction, right now their party is not functioning.

I didn't think this through, but my point is I've never before seen someone this obviously incapable of even knowing what a president actually does. Say what you will about his politics (they were awful! He shut down government oversight on so many industries and shut down the state-run asylums entirely!), but at least with Reagan you knew the guy actually knew how to be a president and how to avoid accidentally starting a nuclear war over his own pride. You can't say the same about Trump. I expect Day 1 of a Trump presidency would be him hearing the phrase "Um, no Mr. President, we can't actually do that, and here's why." over and over again, with Night 1 being a televised "state of the nation" (with a studio audience of his biggest supporters) in which Trump complains about how ineffective the government is because it won't just follow his orders and do what he wants already. At the end of 90 days, he'll have ordered a ship to fire on another country's ship because they jeered at them, and suddenly we're in a war. Also he might at some point choke on some wine, but I'm not sure if that'll be before or after the inevitable impeachment.

On the note of Reagan, Trump criticized Reagan's immigration policies in today's debate. I'm sure that's going to help him with those in the Republican Party who don't like him... :p

Beyond that yeah, we have never seen a candidate this unbelievably ignorant. We saw that again tonight.