Reprinted from Sputnik
First Presidential Debate 2016 - Trump vs Hillary
(Image by Globalization News, Channel: Globalization News) Details DMCA
The temptation is irresistible to conceptualize the Clinton Machine's strategy going into the first US presidential debate; let Donald Trump metastasize into a pretzel. Mission not impossible; in fact, accomplished.
Sniffin' and slidin', beepin' and sippin', angrily chokin', even swoopin' on the mic to choreograph a blow, "Donald" (as addressed by "Secretary Clinton") fell for every shape and size of bait thrown by a canny, relentlessly focused and rehearsed-to-death, Yale-trained, Lawyerly Mother Superior. Freud, Jung and Lacan must have shed tears of joy in their heavenly pad watching the Ego-unraveling show.
While Secretary Clinton controlled the debate, Donald could not even control his temper; but this being The Donald, it did not prevent him from launching an out of left field self-elegy to his "temperament."
Yet on the Donald front it was mostly painful to watch. Stream of consciousness non-sequiturs ruled, as in, "I have a son who's 10, he's so good with computers" -- running commentary on US cyber-security vulnerability.
But then, from a global public opinion point of view, there's geopolitics -- something that vastly infantilized swathes of Americans consider at best a big, meaningless word. Yet Secretary Clinton herself was keen to emphasize, "words matter."
So let's see how (and if) geopolitical words made sense at the Trump/Hillary cage match.
Trump defuses WWIII
Donald demonized mostly China (on trade) and Iran, while Secretary Clinton forcefully demonized Russia and Iran. North Korea and terrorism were also on the cards; thus both sides amply paid tribute to the Pentagon's top five 21st century "existential threats" to the American eagle.
Trump's view of China seems to come from someone reading Sun Tzu on LSD; "You look at what China's doing to our country in terms of making our product, they're devaluing their currency and there's nobody in our government to fight them... They're using our country as a piggy bank to rebuild China, and many other countries are doing the same thing."
Beijing is not practicing quantitative easing (QE); actually it's the US, Japan and Germany who do.
Unfortunately Donald did not elaborate on climate change; a November 7, 2012 Trump tweet ruled that global warming was invented by China to devastate the US manufacturing industry.
On the other hand Trump may have -- indirectly -- validated China's One Belt, One Road (OBOR), a.k.a. The New Silk Roads, which are all about infrastructure upgrading; "You land at La Guardia, Newark, L.A.X., and you come in from Dubai and Qatar, you come in from China, you see these incredible airports, we've become a third-world country."
Donald blamed Secretary Clinton for turning Iran into a "major power" -- a shtick that may have been written by dodgy casino mogul Sheldon Adelson (in the audience, and courted like a monarch). He described the Iran nuclear deal as "one of the worst deals made by any country in history," insisting "$400 million in cash" were part of the deal, and Hillary's responsible. Donald knows it because "I met with Bibi Netanyahu the other day."
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