It was two against one in the Monday night presidential debate. We had moderator Lester Holt, who apparently assumed he was a candidate, too, and Hillary Clinton, well-equipped with policy malformations, against Donald Trump. Trump wasn’t nearly as bad as I anticipated — much closer to reality on the economy, police, guns and Iran, for instance, if issues still count in this contest.
Again and again, the ill-informed, biased Holt asked Trump tough, personal questions and, when he didn’t like the answers, interrupted him in a way that should have been left up to Clinton, who was spared an equivalent assault. They call it fact-checking, but this was a debate, not a reporter’s interview, and he had some facts utterly confused.
The economy was issue No. 1, and Clinton espoused the usual, worsening federal interventions, the most absurd being President Barack Obama’s global warming plan. Now before the Supreme Court, the clearly unconstitutional plan could cost all kinds of fossil fuel jobs, as Trump pointed out.
Through subsidies, it could also hurt the green industry, which would do better by heeding market demands. It would raise utility rates, damn the economy with energy deprivations and, according to experts, do next to nothing by itself to affect global warming by century’s end.
