The Lauer Bomb?

The NBC Comander-In-Chief Forum hosted by Matt Lauer is getting mixed reactions, and no wonder:  Matt actually asked serious questions and Hillary was in good form.  Trump was Trump and while we would like to see more substance from “The Donald,” he managed to keep his brogans out of his mouth.  Who won?  Who knows?  But, the reactions are telling:

Dylan Byers of CNN Tweeted, “Don’t send Matt Lauer to do a political journalist’s job,” and you can be sure MSNBC will have its’ nose out-of-joint all day.  The one real point the critics have was Lauer overlooking Trump’s change in position on the Iraq war saying he always opposed it.  That is not the case. 

We think it would be far better were Trump to say, “I was for it until I learned more about it.  I took the word of the people we elected to deal with it.”   Matt’s critics feel he was not hard enough on Trump and that he was not may signal something important happening in the press corps.

Lauer was seen as being aggressive with Hillary Clinton, but given all the questions on the emails, Benghazi, The Clinton Foundation and the likes of US Naval Flight Officer Lester noting that had he done even one thing like she did in handling Classified information he would be in jail meant the questioners were not screened and scripted in the usual Clinton appearance manner.  This has to be putting the Clinton campaign on notice the debates are going to be minefields.

Lauer stuck with the email issue for an awkward ten minutes of Hillary's 30 minute segment.  This was not a cover, one minute, exposure followed by softballs.   As well, Lauer interrupted Hillary's rambling answers of the kind she uses to run out the clock.  "New York's" journalist Jonathan Chait wrote, "Most voters, and all the more so undecided voters, subsist on a news diet supplied by the likes of Matt Lauer."  This indicates the professional folks are seeing a change in the winds.

Enlargements of Hillary's face show she is wearing an earpiece device of some kind.  It is likely not a hearing aid as she has never been noted as wearing one and it is not a security device of the kind used by the Secret Service.  It is more like the prompting devices used by stage and film actors as it is designed not to be seen.

We note the device could be used in an emergency of the kind experienced by Parkinsons Syndrome patients have a "freeze," but they can be recovered by having someone talk them out of the state by calling their names and telling them "...I'm here.  Come back..." and so on.  It could well be that someone is watching Hillary to see if she freezes and needs to be talked out of her trance.

The show was interesting and may well go into the record books as the Lauer bomb.

Adrian Vance