Lester “Candy” Holt Moderates a Completely Useless Debate. Nobody Won. America Lost.

I had a feeling when Lester “Candy” Holt, who was every bit as partisan and self injecting as Candy Crowley was 4 years ago, began by talking about 6 years of unprecedented job growth under Obama and Secretary Clinton that Trump was about to be ambushed. And I was right.

But did this completely tilted “debate” change any minds? Absolutely not. But the polls will show Hillary with momentum and she will see a 6 to 8 point rise in her numbers over the next few days. But fear not, the polls are not showing movement in Hillary’s direction. Not at all.

You see, for the past few days the pundits and news shows have been talking about Trump’s rising numbers in the polls. He has “come from behind” and the race is now tied. But there really hasn’t been much movement in the polls themselves, just in the mix of Republicans and Democrats sampled.

Can you say set up?

Most of the polls have been moving from sampling +10 or more Democrats to +3 or +4 or even the same number of both. You would think that the pundits would look at the numbers behind the polls. But they just take them at face value. When you consider that Obama won in 2008 with +7 Democrats and in 2012 with +6, it is unreasonable to poll +10 or +12 – double the turnout for Obama. Hillary’s enthusiasm gap is wide.

But I fully expect that by this weekend, the polls will show a post debate bounce for Hillary as the pollsters up the sample of Democrats to drive the narrative. And other tricks they do is poll 85% Republicans and Democrats and 15% Independents. With Indy’s breaking almost 2 to 1 for Trump, this dilutes the Trump votes also.

No one remembers the poll predictions in September and October. It is only the last poll that the polling outfit will be judged by. So at this point, a lot of them manipulate the samples to influence opinion rather than measure it. And the media let’s them get by without a challenge.

But I would bet that Hillary starts going up in the polls as the week goes on. But last night’s debate changed nothing.

The entire “birther” segment was designed to paint Trump as a racist. Because if you question Obama’s place of birth you must be a racist. Except that Trump also questioned Canadian born Ted Cruz’ eligibility as well. And Holt allowed Hillary, who started the whole birther thing in 2008 to skate. Why no question about her starting the birther movement in 2008? Glad Trump reminded people.

And the 1972 Justice Department suit against hundreds of Apartment owners was the beginnings of the whole “redlining” debacle that actually caused the housing crisis that crashed the economy in 2008. And guess who played a big role in that crisis in the 1980’s? Tim Kaine, Hillary’s running mate. And while Hillary blamed Reagan’s “Trickle Down” economics for the housing market crash (???) it was actually people like Tim Kaine.

Redlining, in case you don’t know, was the term used to “prove” banks were practicing racial discrimination in lending by comparing the number of declined mortgage applications in poor areas to those in wealthy areas. It seems that poor people were turned down more often than more affluent individuals. And since the population in poor areas was heavily black and in wealthy areas heavily white, it must be racism. Because poor people are just as good a borrower as wealthy, if you don’t consider income.

This was nothing more than a case of banks turning down poor credit risks and loaning to good credit risks. There was no racism involved. Yet the papers printed the name of the racist redlining banks every week for the entire area to see. And guess which bank was the most racist statistically, turning down far more black potential borrowers than white borrowers? Consolidated Bank and Trust – a black owned bank chartered by black businesswoman Maggie Walker:

In 1902, [Maggie Walker] published a newspaper for the organization, “The St. Luke Herald.” Shortly after, she chartered the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank. Mrs. Walker served as the bank’s first president, which earned her the recognition of being the first black woman to charter a bank in the United States. Later she agreed to serve as chairman of the board of directors when the bank merged with two other Richmond banks to become The Consolidated Bank and Trust Company, which grew to serve generations of Richmonders as an African-American owned institution.

Nothing says racism like a black bank turning down black customers for loans. The truth is, the people turned down were not “redlined” because of race. They were turned down because they were a poor credit risk.

But that didn’t stop Tim Kaine! In 1998 he won a $100 million lawsuit for redlining against Nationwide Lender. But his role as a civil right’s warrior was shore lived when the Va Supreme Court overturned the lower court ruling.

But enter Barney Frank and his campaign to force banks to lend to people who were not creditworthy and Fannie and Freddie as the bottomless pit of available money for bad credit risks, bam! There’s your smoking gun for the Real Estate crash. Not Reagan and Trickle Down Economics. (You can read more about this in a post I wrote last year.)

But back to the debate.

If you were tuning in to help you decide which candidate had the best plans for your future, Lester “Candy” Holt was absolutely no help at all. Who has the better plan for the economy? For Terrorism? For National Security? For anything?

You sure did not learn that last night. Holt tossed out lofty topics but allowed the discussion, and even led the discussion, to Hillary’s talking points. He tried to fact check Trump – but never Hillary. And last night, Sean Hannity confirmed that Donald Trump was VERY anti war despite Holt and his “fact” checkers assertion that Trump was pro war. Hint: stop using the DNC and Hillary’s website to check facts. There is no truth there.

I would give Hillary and Trump both a “C” for their performance. There was absolutely nothing of substance in the debate, nothing new was learned and Holt turned what should have been America’s first opportunity to see the candidates one on one into a mindless and worthless wast of 2 hours we will never get back. He focused too much on gotcha questions and attempts to embarrass Donald Trump with minutia that is both irrelevant and not helpful to selecting the next president.

Holt was an ineffective moderator and inept Clinton stooge that never managed to steer the two hour argument into a win for Hillary or a win for the American public that was the big loser last night.

Holt gets an “F” for his shameful and unsuccessful partisan debacle.

And I have to ask every single debate. What is wrong with the GOP that they allow these shameless partisan hacks to “moderate” debates?

I hope the rest of the debates take this task seriously.

America learned nothing of value last night.