Looking for Substance in All the Wrong Places.
Monday was an off day for the Red Sox, so I was able to spent 90 minutes watching the First Presidential Debate which aired at 3:00 o’clock in the afternoon here. Lucky me.
I watched it all, start to finish, because I want to be a responsible voter. But I must say that I find watching Donald Trump on television to be very frustrating. I try very hard to follow what he says—I really do—but I almost immediately become distracted by his use of incomplete sentences, facial expressions, catch phrases, and the sudden off-topic digressions.
I turn to my wife and blurt “My God! Did he just say . . . ?” But she wasn’t watching.
All of those distractions keep me from grasping any actual SUBSTANCE of his comments. What specifically did The Donald say he would do about Problem X? I once was told that it’s helpful to go back later and read the transcripts of what was said … slowly and carefully … with no distraction.
And it really does work. For instance, Trump was asked a question about cyber warfare during Monday’s debate. Here’s a verbatim transcript of his response:
“As far as the cyber, I agree to parts of what Secretary Clinton said, we should be better than anybody else, and perhaps we’re not. I don’t know if we know it was Russia who broke into the DNC.
“She’s saying Russia, Russia, Russia. Maybe it was. It could also be China, it could be someone sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds. You don’t know who broke into DNC, but what did we learn? We learn that Bernie Sanders was taken advantage of by your people. By Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Look what happened to her.
“But Bernie Sanders was taken advantage of. Now, whether that was Russia, whether that was China, whether it was another country, we don’t know, because the truth is, under President Obama we’ve lost control of things that we used to have control over. We came in with an internet, we came up with the internet.
“And I think Secretary Clinton and myself would agree very much, when you look at what ISIS is doing with the internet, they’re beating us at our own game. ISIS. So we have to get very, very tough on cyber and cyber warfare. It is a . . . it is a huge problem.
“I have a son. He’s 10 years old. He has computers. He is so good with these computers, it’s unbelievable. The security aspect of cyber is very, very tough. And maybe it’s hardly do-able. But I will say, we are not doing the job we should be doing, but that’s true throughout our whole governmental society. We have so many things that we have to do better, Lester, and certainly cyber is one of them.”
So? Did you find any actual substance in there? Nope, neither did I.
He answered beside the point, maybe because he didn’t know what the question was about, or maybe because he saw an opportunity to exploit a flaw in Clinton’s campaign, and to divert attention from hist alleged ties to the Kremlin, but he’s not wrong that the DNC and Clinton were very quick to point to the Russians, and they did try to divert attention from what those emails said, too.
He also raised some interesting questions and make some interesting remarks in the example you’ve given. Cyber warfare is more than wizkids breaking an entry in government or company computers, or constructing ever so clever viruses to steal information or crash the ICT of an ‘ennemy’, it’s also winning the hearts and minds of people using the internet, and ISIS is very good at incorporating all the tips and tricks used in Hollywood to lure people to theyr side. And often, the responses by government agencies are ludicrously bad, without any attraction.
Still, I wouldn’t want to see him as the next POTUS.
Too late to correct my post, but ‘ennemy’ should be ‘enemy’ (I got confused with the French ‘ennemi’ and ‘theyr’ should be ‘their’, obviously.
You’re forgiven … especially since my posts are often full typos!