It's no wonder Hillary Clinton hates the news media.
The New York Times has a curious reporting theme this season. It invokes some matter on which it acknowledges Clinton is not guilty of any confirmed wrongdoing. Then it reports ominously that the matter "casts a shadow" nonetheless. Sometimes it's the Times itself that is the shadow.
Cable commentators have taken to calling Donald Trump occasionally "presidential," or something approximating that, but only in comparison to the subterranean bar that is himself. He got the descriptor recently merely for finding his way to Mexico City, standing behind a podium and beside a national president, and igniting only a Twitter spat, not an international incident.
Then this guy, Matt Lauer of NBC, who basically was a press agent for bogus swimmer Ryan Lochte, set out to redeem himself against Clinton.
It happened Wednesday night at the so-called "Commander-in-Chief Forum," which was generally considered a good event for Trump and a bad event for Clinton, which is to say an ominous event for the republic.
Clinton could barely squeeze in a few words edgewise about her clear and Trump-transcendent command of world affairs. That's because Lauer belabored ad nauseam the weary matter of her emails.
Those are the private-server emails Clinton sent and received as secretary of state that she has repeatedly admitted to having been a mistake, and which a credible director of the FBI has determined not to have run afoul of any law.
The questioning basically was of this variety: When would Clinton stop insulting our brave service men and women by daring to offer herself as their commander-in-chief when she had committed such a woeful indiscretion with sensitive information?
But Clinton did not violate any statute. She did not knowingly or intentionally endanger any national security information. There is no known negative consequence for the country from her action. Yet Lauer devoted nearly half of his segment with her to questions about the emails, even to the point of asking her to cut short an answer about something actually important, meaning ISIS.
"I realize this is TV," Hillary said.
The first bad thing that happened to her this night was rotten luck. She lost the toss and Trump chose to go second. The second bad thing was that Lauer began by absurdly encouraging her to talk only about herself, not negatively about her opponent.
He thus took away Hillary's best message, which is that she isn't Trump.
Meanwhile, Trump was proclaimed to have done well in the event only--again--by the most generously forgiving of grading curves, meaning the one by which he is compared only to his usual self.
The man trashed American generals, calling them rubble, and actually declared that our great, compassionate and freedom-spreading country should have essentially conquered Iraq and stolen its oil, which he said we could have done by leaving behind a few troops to guard oil wells.
He said ISIS had grown rich from that oil, though ISIS has grown rich from Syrian oil.
"What kind of insanity is that?" asked retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey on one of the cable talkfests afterward, referring to the oil-conquering nonsense.
It was the kind of insanity Trump could get away with because Lauer didn't laugh in his face as he objectively should have.
It was perhaps not altogether as insane as other things The Donald The Conqueror has said and done, although it ranked well up there--as did Trump's reiterated admiration for the leadership style of the authoritarian aggressor Vladimir Putin.
Trump also said he'd opposed all along George W. Bush's war in Iraq, when, in fact, Trump had told radio shock jock Howard Stern at the time that he guessed he supported it.
Trump also reiterated an old tweet in which he essentially said that putting men and woman together in the military was an invitation for rape.
Alas, Clinton contributed to her troubles--also as usual for her--by declaring that she would never deploy ground troops to defeat ISIS.
We already deploy ground troops against ISIS. And no matter the compelling current logic against additional or mass ground troops, a commander-in-chief should never hamstring herself in terms of options against an evil enemy.
So the evening merely furthered a developing narrative: Clinton is getting harassed unfairly and is frustrated; Trump is getting graded generously against the easy curve of himself; and Clinton compounds her problem with clumsy performance.
Her biggest enemies, in order: 1. The vast right-wing conspiracy, currently spreading vile rumors that she's ill. 2. The media. 3. Herself.
She is still slightly ahead. Presumably that could change in the debates if he gets through them without dropping an F-bomb.
Actually, on the Trump grading curve, he'd probably have to go multi-syllabic.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 09/11/2016