Why Hillary Clinton Didn't Win the First Debate

     My faithful reader CC sent me a link to a Yahoo political article that he called "a dumb analysis" of Monday night's debate. It was entitled, "Why Clinton Hasn't Put Trump Away". And in my defense of the article, I told my dear friend, who tends to see things the same way I do, that I thought it wasn't dumb at all and that it was pretty perspicacious. This was one time we'd respectfully have to agree to disagree.
     CC often acts as not only my Greek chorus but also my political muse of sorts and sometimes my responses to him are so in-depth and perceptive in their own right, I feel it incumbent to expand, clarify and share them with you. So here are some insights that even the incomparable Mike Flannigan in his worthy analysis didn't bother making:
     First off, Clinton didn't win the debate, certainly not by any clear margin, simply because she chose not to go after Trump. And the same has to go for Trump. Why? Pre-debate collusion, plain and simple. Police, Special Forces operators and anyone going into a combat situation all have to have clearly-defined ROE (Rules of Engagement). And this goes for politicians who decide in some absurd Marquis de Queensbury rules what's permissible and what's off-limits. These same rules or something very similar to them apply to politicians who have pre-scripted questions given to them in advance of pressers and guests of talk shows who do pre-interviews with the hosts to ensure the exchange goes smoothly at air time. So it's not much of a stretch to say there was some serious negotiating going on between Camps Clinton and Trump well shy of air time.

     Secondly, we'll likely never know why, exactly, Trump is running for President and feeding his Jovian-sized ego and a hunger of power falls far short of explaining his motives. We all know Clinton is a power-starved psychopath who honestly thinks the Presidency is her due, some heirloom that we owe her. Yet this also seems at stark odds with why she decided to put on the kid gloves when dealing with the man whose wedding she'd gone to not that long ago.

 

      For instance, she could've hit Trump hard enough on a whole host of issues to guarantee he'd lose the debate to all but the knuckle-dragging dead-enders who proudly wear Trump's bad red hat, who bet on WWE matches and calls Black Lives Matter a terrorist group. For instance:

     Clinton had a couple of Gotcha moments, such as when she got Trump to admit to being "smart" for not paying his taxes and to boasting he capitalized and exploited the housing crash, calling it, "business." But she still pulled her punches and, for the most part, that was so incredibly by design. 

     Clinton is a born infighter. This is someone who smeared a 12 year-old child to win a rape case. This is someone who smeared many women who'd accused her husband of raping or making sexual advances toward them. This was someone who busted her hump using every single, dirty fucking trick from the GOP playbook to illegally hamstring the Sanders campaign.

     I've long suspected Meryl Streep based her character in The Manchurian Candidate of a ball-cutting US Senator on Hillary Clinton. She was so vicious and so calculating, she twisted enough dicks at the convention to get the Democrats to throw under the bus a safe, bland mainstream running mate (Not very dissimilar to Tim Kaine, who looks like Hollywood's version of a what a VP should look and sound like) to get her son on the underside of the ticket.

     Make no mistake about it. Clinton is a knife and piano wire artist. And if she'd hit Trump as hard as she knee-capped Bernie Sanders, she would've been practically inaugurated Monday night.
     She could've put him away by harping on his misogyny, corporate predation, tax dodging, all sorts of things. But that was never her aim nor was it Trump's. Otherwise, why didn't he harp on her Foundation woes, the nightmare the Clintons imposed on Haiti, why didn't he hammer away at her still-unfolding email scandal? This was arranged behind the scenes, as it always is.

     The fix is in and it doesn't just involve the "Democratic" Party.