He only looks slightly more intimidating with his glasses on.
The Today Show anchor only looks slightly more intimidating with his glasses on. Miro Vrlik Photography / Shutterstock.com

Word from the failing New York Times is that moderator Matt Lauer lost NBC's "Commander-In-Chief Forum," which was held last night in front of a plane with a lizard painted on it. The forum was designed to give voters an idea of how Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump would fare as the head of the most powerful military in the world, but mostly everybody's talking about how Matt Lauer interrupted Hillary Clinton a bunch (which was seen as sexist) and didn't live fact-check Trump when he falsely claimed he has always been against the Iraq war.

To be fair to Lauer, it's difficult to fact check Trump in real time. It's not always clear when Trump has completed a thought in the first place, many of his grammatical constructions completely resist comprehension (e.g. from last night, "Something has to be happened"), and he lies quickly and often. Faced with a wall of nonsense, I can see the argument for letting Trump hang himself and moving on to another question.

Anyhow, Lauer spent a lot of time of time grilling Clinton on the e-mail scandal. In response, Hillary reminded everyone that she said she'd made a "mistake" re: her e-mails and then assumed her defense lawyer mode as she tried to explain the weedy details about government classification/communication systems. She could have explained that we classify way too much information. She could have pointed out that the '(c)' on the three e-mails out of the 30,000 in question meant "confidential," a level of access that is lower than "classified" info, which may account for why she feels as if she didn't "receive or send" anything marked "classified." But she didn't.

She did sort of explain that the communication system the state department uses doesn't move fast enough for the 21st century. This problem directly relates to one of the latest and largest issues lefty doves and conservatives of all species have with the e-mail scandal: The fact that she discussed matters relating to CIA drone strikes. In her conversation with Lauer, she said that she and other state officials must talk around the fact that they're talking about drones. In the e-mails Lauer mentioned, she said her team "had to have an answer that did not move into a classified area." So it sounds like she was in a position to either do her job and possibly get shit for it, or to not do her job. In those e-mail chains, she elected to do the former.

Despite Lauer's probing questions, and despite Clinton's obvious and numerous health issues (she didn't even cough once—interesting), the secretary of state managed to give detailed, substantive responses to questions about how to deal with Iran, how to start organizing the VA's bureaucratic nightmare, and how she plans to address ISIS. The "neocon warmonger" emphatically promised not to deploy any ground troops to Iraq and Syria, and also said she views force "as a last resort, not a first choice." She even refrained from promising that she could 100% prevent a terrorist attack from happening on her watch!

Nothing about Honduras, sorry. But the real question is: Was that an earpiece in her ear or was she incubating the eggs of extraterrestrial lizards?


Trump's answers to Lauer's questions demonstrated the candidate's general lack of knowledge and/or were outright lies.

When National Book Award Winner Phil Klay asked Trump's plans for the region after defeating ISIS, Trump said his plan for the future of the middle east is to have already taken Iraq's oil in the past. When Lauer asked if Trump had a military plan to defeat ISIS in the first place, Trump implied he didn't have a plan, then immediately implied that he did have a plan, then said he had a plan but that he wasn't going to tell anybody about it, and then at some point he threatened to reveal a piece of paper with the names of 88 generals and admirals on it.

Trump's factual triumph of the evening came when he "Well, Actually'd" Rachel Fredericks, a Trump-leaning veteran aviations specialist who struggles with PTSD and who said she lost two friends to suicide. She asked him what he'd do to stop 20 vets a day from killing themselves. "Actually it's 22," he replied, before later confirming her number of 20 and then offering no plan to improve the mental health of U.S. vets.

As for everything else, the most egregious lies involved his claim that he was initially against the war in Iraq (he wasn't) and also his position on women serving in the military. When a vet in the audience announced his concern about the military's rape problem, Trump apparently reflected that concern and speculated that the military might solve that issue by instituting "a court system within the military." Which. So Lauer brought up the following Trump tweet, in which Trump implies that sexual assault is the natural result of a coed military service:


"It is a correct Tweet," Trump said, before giving a non-response to Lauer's follow-up about whether men and women should serve together in the armed forces.

At his most bone-headed, Trump said he was shocked by "something" he learned about Obama during one of his recent intelligence briefings, but he wouldn't say what that something was. He cited his personal expertise in reading body language to determine the intelligence officials' opinions about the president. He said that Putin was a better leader than Obama, and of course there was this moment:


So, Hillary provided semi-detailed and mostly non-evasive answers to hard questions. Donald Trump complimented a dictator who has repeatedly violated the Geneva Conventions, and vows to work with him to bomb the "you know what" out of ISIS. A few of the questioners in the audience last night claimed to be "undecided." I have no idea how that is possible.