“The people of this country are furious,” Trump said at one point in the debate. “There has never been anything like this.” He was correct. In sum, instead of being content on asking for forgiveness for his behavior, Trump engaged in a fierce, highly personalized and, unlike the first debate, well-prepared attack on his opponent, her husband and her views. Clinton responded in kind and the result was a constant series of exchanges, of an intensity and anger unlike any in previous presidential debates in memory. With the debate came the assurance that Donald Trump would fight to the end. With a month to go, the election was far from over.
American Catholics, left, right, and center, practice their faith with flexible
interpretations of core doctrine that are only made more complicated by the
thorough integration of Protestant theological assumptions into American
political thought and culture. American
Catholics are “cafeteria
Catholics” who confront immorality the way Supreme Court Justice Potter
Stewart famously confronted the question of what constitutes pornography.
Craven and ham-fisted efforts to twist these popular approaches to the practice
of Catholicism into prima facie evidence of hypocrisy or bigotry do a disservice
to our national political conversation and contribute mightily to the dumbing
down of American politics.
Donald Trump’s candidacy is (ironically enough) “A DISASTER” for religious conservatives because it exposes their “ends justify the means” morality, though to say that it reveals their hypocrisy is, frankly, both too easy and not particularly useful. What it exposes is their policy rationality. What it exposes is the reason why it has been quite rational of them to use manufactured “character” and personal “values” issues to muddy the public opinion waters in order to advance anti-choice, anti-gay, anti-science public policy proposals. Hardline social/cultural conservatives support policies that have become political poison in American national politics.
After the debate, the instant television analysis was that Pence had done well and had won the debate. Further, a number commenting on his gentlemanly manner of response (as contrast with Kaine’s intensity) immediately pronounced him the frontrunner for the 2020 Republican presidential nomination. The lesson would seem to be that a politician who looks unruffled on television while effectively stonewalling an opponent, constantly denying what had taken place in the campaign or in this case what Trump said or did and lying (“not true”, “false,”) qualifies as the perfect future presidential candidate.