Trump: "OK. But you were in contact -- excuse me. You were...
Clinton: "At some point, we need to do some fact-checking here.
Trump: "You were in total contact with the White House, and perhaps, sadly, Obama probably still listened to you. I don't think he would be listening to you very much anymore. Obama draws the line in the sand. It was laughed at all over the world what happened."
In bashing Obama for not bombing Syria -- after U.S. intelligence expressed suspicion that the sarin attack was actually carried out by Al Qaeda or a related group trying to trick the U.S. military into attacking the Syrian government -- Trump may have pleased his right-wing base but he was deviating from his generally less war-like stance on the Middle East.
He followed that up with another false right-wing claim that Clinton and Obama had allowed the Russians to surge ahead on nuclear weapons, saying: "our nuclear program has fallen way behind, and they've gone wild with their nuclear program. Not good."
Only after attacking Clinton for not being more militaristic did Trump say a few things that made sense, albeit in his incoherent snide-aside style.
Trump: "Now, she talks tough, she talks really tough against Putin and against Assad. She talks in favor of the rebels. She doesn't even know who the rebels are. You know, every time we take rebels, whether it's in Iraq or anywhere else, we're arming people. And you know what happens? They end up being worse than the people [we overthrow].
"Look at what she did in Libya with [Muammar] Gaddafi. Gaddafi's out. It's a mess. And, by the way, ISIS has a good chunk of their oil. I'm sure you probably have heard that." [Actually, whether one has heard it or not, that point is not true. During the ongoing political and military strife, Libya has been blocked from selling its oil, which is shipped by sea.]
Trump continued: "It was a disaster. Because the fact is, almost everything she's done in foreign policy has been a mistake and it's been a disaster.
"But if you look at Russia, just take a look at Russia, and look at what they did this week, where I agree, she wasn't there, but possibly she's consulted. We sign a peace treaty. Everyone's all excited. Well, what Russia did with Assad and, by the way, with Iran, who you made very powerful with the dumbest deal perhaps I've ever seen in the history of deal-making, the Iran deal, with the $150 billion, with the $1.7 billion in cash, which is enough to fill up this room.
"But look at that deal. Iran now and Russia are now against us. So she wants to fight. She wants to fight for rebels. There's only one problem. You don't even know who the rebels are. So what's the purpose?"
While one can't blame Raddatz for Trump's scattered thinking -- or for Clinton's hawkishness -- the moderator's failure to frame the Syrian issue in a factual and nuanced way contributed to this dangerously misleading "debate" on a grave issue of war and peace.
It is surely not the first time that the mainstream U.S. media has failed the American people in this way, but -- given the stakes of a possible nuclear war with Russia -- this propagandistic style of "journalism" is fast becoming an existential threat.
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