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If you thought Chuck Tingle’s version of the Clinton-Trump debate last night was surreal, well, take a look at what Dilbert creator and wannabe master persuader Scott Adams has to say about it.
Unlike some of Trump’s superfans, Adams is willing to admit that, yeah, Hillary kind of won the debate, at least by normal debate standards.
Clinton won on points. She had more command of the details and the cleaner answers. Trump did a lot of interrupting and he was defensive. If this were a college debate competition, Clinton would be declared the winner.
But Adams thinks this “victory on the 2D chess board” doesn’t really matter, because in his mind, apparently, Trump is playing some kind of 95th Dimensional mashup of Chess, Cribbage, and Hungry Hungry Hippos, or something. And in this game, Trump is the clear winner.
“Clinton won the debate last night,” Adams explains. “And while she was doing it, Trump won the election.”
IS YOUR MIND BLOWN YET
On the off chance that your mind is not, in fact, blown, let’s look at exactly why Adams thinks Trump is the real victor in this game of 95th Dimension Chesscribbippos.
As he sees it, Hillary needed to prove to skeptical Americans (or at least to Dr. Adams) that she’s healthy. And she failed.
Clinton looked (to my eyes) as if she was drugged, tired, sick, or generally unhealthy, even though she was mentally alert and spoke well. But her eyes were telling a different story. She had the look of someone whose doctors had engineered 90 minutes of alertness for her just for the event.
Huh. This is your takeaway from a debate in which Trump sniffled so much that people started to wonder if he wasn’t hopped up on the cocaine?
Some will say Clinton outperformed expectations because she didn’t cough, collapse, or die right on stage.
But that’s not enough for Adams, who raises the serious medical question: Is Hillary’s smile kind of weird?
Clinton’s smile seemed forced, artificial, and frankly creepy. … My neighbor Kristina hypothesized that Botox was making her smile look unnatural. Science tells us that when a person’s mouth smiles, but their eyes don’t match the smile, they look disingenuous if not creepy. Botox on your crow’s feet lines around your eyes can give that effect. But whatever the reason, something looked off to me.
CLEARLY UNQUALIFIED TO BE PRESIDENT
Trump, by contrast, was the perfect model of health and handsomeness! Well, not entirely.
To be fair, Trump’s physical appearance won’t win him any votes either. But his makeup looked better than I have seen it (no orange), his haircut was as good as it gets for him … .
But Trump didn’t WIN THE ELECTION LAST NIGHT just by being somewhat less orange than usual. He showed what a calm, cool, and collected customer he is.
Trump needed to solve exactly one problem: Look less scary. Trump needed to counter Clinton’s successful branding of him as having a bad temperament to the point of being dangerous to the country. Trump accomplished exactly that…by…losing the debate.
Wait, what?
Trump was defensive, and debated poorly at points, but he did not look crazy.
MASSIVE WIN
And pundits noticed that he intentionally avoided using his strongest attacks regarding Bill Clinton’s scandals.
You actually think he lost the debate … on purpose?
In other words, he showed control. He stayed in the presidential zone under pressure. And in so doing, he solved for his only remaining problem. He looked safer.
As I put it in a tweet to Adams last night (you’ll have to forgive my typo):
Yeah, Trump throwing a tantrum as the same exact moment he was attacking Hillary for having a bad "temperament" was super duper reassuring. https://t.co/RQnRLxd66C
— David Futrelle (@DavidFutrelle) September 27, 2016
Trump definitely looked presidential, not at all like a giant petulant baby who shouldn’t even be in the same city as the nuclear codes.
BLINKING SARCASM.GIF
The most memorable moments of the first debate: Clinton laughs off Trump’s temperament barb https://t.co/NW6ToTCDFS https://t.co/IR90V9KcLc
— POLITICO (@politico) September 27, 2016
Ladies and gentleman, Donald J. Trump! https://t.co/H9Uy8yzNYZ by @RiosJose559 via @c0nvey
— FLOR DO DESERTO (@FlorDeserto) September 27, 2016
https://twitter.com/peterwsinger/status/780607277938147328
https://twitter.com/CCW000/status/780897508310458368
Oh, wait, that last one isn’t Trump. Hard to tell sometimes.
And here’s the latest Pledge Drive capybara, with a friend:
My cat does that same massaging thing to the border collie. After a while she’s had enough, and she gets up & moves – but he just trots along after her.
Meanwhile, the entire Internet has been remarking on Drumpf’s repeated sniffles and lip-smacks, and speculating as to the cause. Howard Dean, an MD by training, suspects cocaine. And he would no doubt know the signs…
Was it ever actually confirmed that Bill was cheating? It could have been an open relationship, before that existed as a common term.
…I mean, it’s not especially relevant, since even if he was cheating they obviously reconciled – she doesn’t need him to survive or continue her lifestyle or anything like that. But it would seem extra hypocritical if that wasn’t even true to begin with.
This is an interesting take on things but fits in what we see a lot from MRAs: they can never admit defeat. (Here it’s: we lost a little bit won a lot.) It’s like if they don’t admit it, it didn’t happen, and somehow their words will spin reality to fit with what they wish happened. It always makes me wonder what it would take for them to admit defeat. Would Clinton physically kicking Trump’s butt do it?
Something slightly off topic from the OP: I’ve been reading about people who think Trump won and Clinton lost. They give reasons like Clinton came off “smug,” like a “know-it-all”, and “overprepared.” Some man interviewed by Upworthy who claimed to have switched from Clinton to Trump because of the debate said this. I also read a couple commented at Joe My God saying different Trump-supporting neighbors used similar verbiage, notably “smug.” This commenter wondered where they were getting this canned talking points. Possibly Fox News, their local church? I wondered the same, and especially when within this short span of time? Thoughts?
@Jaygee
I get the term “stumbled” alot. Forgive me but stream of consciousness bullshit that is immediately countered and called out on for vagueness, hypocrisy and factual inaccuracies doesn’t seem to me count as anything close to a win both on substance and in convincing the audience.
Or saying “WRONG WRONG WRONG” like a buzzer and talking over the moderator.
Kupo
They’d just point out that Clinton’s the one covered in crap.
@Jaygee
Here you go: https://www.google.com/amp/www.foxnews.com/opinion/2016/09/27/at-first-debate-trump-couldn-t-wipe-that-smug-grin-off-hillary-s-face-but-came-close.amp.html
SCOTT ADAMS START LEARNING POLITICAL DEBATE SKILLS YOU GOT ONE HOUR TO GO AND YOU WILL BE RATED IN THE END.
http://i.imgur.com/Ij0qtNN.png
@Herr Von F (ooh, a “von”!)
Correct.
But that bar will be too high for the second debate.
So we’ve got a candidate who has repeatedly been accused of racism who refuses to so much as shake the hand of the black moderator? Yea, *that* was a good idea. What a dope.
@Tara the Antisocial Social Worker:
BEST THING EVER
Even Scott Adams has to know he’s talking out of his ass on this one. He’s just saying this to make him feel better, right?
I fear the answer is that when adultery is committed that it is the fault of the woman – it’s the entire gatekeeping of sex issue. It goes both ways – it’s her responsibility to not give it up until marriage, and then her responsibility to lock him away by using the Power of Sex appropriately.
I would have thought that was hyperbole until I came across a forum on how to deal with various family issues and the thread of ‘our family blames me for him cheating on me’ is a constant repetition.
Wow, I saw this coming a billion miles away. I knew Trump wasn’t gonna do well, but I remember thinking, Trump could go up there and poop his pants and then cry for half and hour and his supporters would still be saying “This is great for the Trump campaign actually, in fact this is even better than if he won, or just didn’t poop his pants!”
This rather desperate and unconvincing positivity reminds me of Spinal Tap’s manager. Scott Adams could have a future in the music biz.
Is this even a misogyny tracking blog anymore? Or is it just for US politics now.
If I read that CNN tweet correctly, trump was congratulating himself backstage for that one as well.
It’s a bit sad when the best you can say is, “well, he didn’t shit himself on stage.”
Wait, his strongest attacks include “A person who is not you did a thing without your knowledge”?
I find it so upsetting that Trump is getting head pats for managing not to have a screaming meltdown, while Clinton gets chastised for–I dunno, not literally ascending off the platform in a sparkling aura of radiant light or something. She’s getting tepid responses for being professional and competent. Trump is getting praised for making a halfhearted attempt at civility.
It’s really not fair.
O.M.F.G.
That Scott Adams tweet about mastering policy in an hour. Holy fucking shit.
I work in policy. It’s my job to sound knowledgeable and to be able to bull shit on policy areas I know relatively little about. It can be done. But not in an hour. And the skill it takes to be able to pull that off convincingly certainly can’t be mastered in an hour. Adams certainly hasn’t mastered it.
In an hour, I could tell him the top issues in my fields of expertise, he might be able to sound knowledgeable briefly. And there is even some benefit from not having practitioner experience (so you can cut through the culture of shared assumptions) but byjebus you can’t master it in an hour.
No. You have to work and focus to get on top of a policy issue – even at a relatively superficial level. And if you want to really know and understand it and you know maybe do something about it, it takes hours and hours and hours of work and listening – really listening – to people with experience. And some of it is mind-bogglingly dull, even for me, someone who is always described as passionate about my policy areas.
Trump just doesn’t have the attention span or the interest to do it. And neither does Adams.
I’m not a racist or a sexist or anything, but I preferred Trump. Trump did seem fairly reasonable to me, and Clinton did look smug – she was standing there looking terribly self-satisfied, being vaguely passive aggressive.
But as Trump said, all she has is a load of bad experience.
She’s the establishment, status-quo candidate. Been in power for decades. Voted for the war in Iraq, and is bought and paid for by Goldman-Sachs.
So, I think I’m going to support Trump now. Maybe that’s a sign he is playing the long game?
Woah. Stuff happened while I was moving. I need to find meself a transcript of the debate after I’ve figured out where to get a steady supply of coffee.
Any interesting troll come while I was gone ?
@Kootiepatra
September 28, 2016 at 2:42 am
while Clinton gets chastised for–I dunno, not literally ascending off the platform in a sparkling aura of radiant light or something.
http://dumpfm.s3.amazonaws.com/images/20151022/1445567774769-dumpfm-cheseball-hilary-clinton-super-saiyan.gif
I’m kinda disappointed that this is the best Super Saiyan gif of H.C
I could find.