DARK AND DISGUSTING

HRC didn’t so much as win the 2^nd debate as The Donald lost it.

After threatening to make Bill Clinton’s affairs a major deal, even bringing a few of his female accusers there for a last minute media event, he only lightly touched on that issue...and also only once went after Hillary on her e-mail issue, where she is vulnerable.

But that trigger one of the 2 Donald highlights...a threat that if elected he would name a special prosecutor in an attempt to “put you in jail.’  (This may not be legal, and as one critic remarked, would make us a "banana republic.”)

Later, out of the clear blue air he charged “you have hate in your heart.”

These two instances maybe are what led the Washington Post to call this debate “dark and  nasty” and led CBS’s veteran Bob Schieffer to say it was the “most disgusting” debate he had seen in 40 years of campaign coverage.

Trump also hit the coal issue, where HRC is weak, saying there was such a thing as “clean coal” (though the industry has done little to advance it), that he had a plan to put miners back to work (not spelled out) and we had “coal for a thousand years” (though the best estimate is only one-quarter of that.)

He continued to deny his support for the Iraq war, in the face of mounting evidence that he did.

Someday  critics will begin calling this approach what it is...not  “doubling down,” but The Big Lie of Josef Goebbels.

Perhaps the most important critique of the debate came when his disagreements with running mate Mike Pence surfaced, when GOP Speaker Paul Ryan said he would not vote for Trump…and when that wily old Kentucky politician, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, refused in Danville and Lexington talks Monday even to comment on the debate.

The election of HRC is by no means assured, but it took a big step ahead Sunday night, courtesy of Donald J. Trump.

I'm just sayin'...