Double Standard

There's been a lot of Internet chatter about how Clinton and Trump are held to different standards, and there were a number of instances of that in the NBC Commander in Chief Forum, moderated by Matt Lauer. But there was one instance of it that I haven't read reported, and that I found quite offensive:

LAUER: Secretary Clinton, let’s talk about your vote in favor of the war in Iraq. You’ve since said it was a mistake.

CLINTON: Mm-hmm.

LAUER: Obviously, it was not something you said you would do again. I asked before for people to raise their hand if you served in Iraq. Can you do it again? How do you think these people feel when the person running to be their commander-in-chief says her vote to go to war in Iraq was a mistake?

The camera panned around the roomful of veterans in the audience when Lauer said "Can you do it again?", and as they raised their hands, there's no doubt it was an uncomfortable moment for Clinton. But when Trump said:

"And I happened to hear Hillary Clinton say that I was not against the war in Iraq. I was totally against the war in Iraq. From a — you can look at Esquire magazine from ’04. You can look at before that.

And I was against the war in Iraq because I said it’s going to totally destabilize the Middle East, which it has. It has absolutely been a disastrous war ..."

Lauer's response? Crickets.

Not only that, but Trump has been extremely outspoken in his criticism of the decision to invade Iraq, although not before or at the beginning of the invasion, as he repeatedly claims, but later, when popular opinion had turned against the war; he repeatedly cites an article in August 2004 -- nearly a year and a half after the invasion -- where he said:

My life is seeing everything in terms of "How would I handle that?" Look at the war in Iraq and the mess that we're in. I would never have handled it that way. Does anybody really believe that Iraq is going to be a wonderful democracy where people are going to run down to the voting box and gently put in their ballot and the winner is happily going to step up to lead the county? C'mon. Two minutes after we leave, there's going to be a revolution, and the meanest, toughest, smartest, most vicious guy will take over. And he'll have weapons of mass destruction, which Saddam didn't have.

What was the purpose of this whole thing? Hundreds and hundreds of young people killed. And what about the people coming back with no arms and legs? Not to mention the other side. All those Iraqi kids who've been blown to pieces. And it turns out that all of the reasons for the war were blatantly wrong. All this for nothing!

What if Lauer had read that quote to the audience of veterans? But no -- Lauer didn't even mention it.

Click here for an article in The New York Times the next day entitled "Matt Lauer Loses the War in a Battle Between the Candidates." It contains goodies such as:

Candidates should expect to be challenged. They’re applying for a challenging job. But where Mr. Lauer treated Mrs. Clinton like someone running for president, he treated Mr. Trump like someone running to figure out how to be president, eventually.

That interview was the apotheosis of this presidential campaign’s forced marriage of entertainment and news. The host of NBC’s morning show interviewed the former star of its reality show “The Apprentice,” and the whole thing played out as farce.

And:

In general, though, Mr. Lauer’s questioning of Mr. Trump was like watching one student quiz another to prep for a test neither had done the reading for. The host asked soft open-ended questions that invited the candidate to answer with word clouds.

Mr. Lauer prefaced one question by saying that “nobody would expect you” to have read deeply into foreign policy before running for president. He asked Mr. Trump if he would be “prepared on Day 1,” a yes-or-no question that will elicit only one answer from any candidate not about to drop out.

And here's a foreboding comment:

Mr. Lauer, fortunately, is not going to moderate a presidential debate. But Fox News’s Chris Wallace is, and he recently said that he does not consider it his job to truth-squad candidates as a moderator. Let’s not mistake who this helps most: the fact-checking website PolitiFact has found far more false statements from Mr. Trump than from Mrs. Clinton.

Actually, Politifact checked Trump on 246 statements and found 53% of them to be either "Pants on Fire" or "Mostly False"; they checked Clinton on 248 statements and found 13% of them "PoF" or "MF."

Click here for another devastating critique of Lauer's performance, this one from Jonathan Chait at New York magazine, entitled "Matt Lauer’s Pathetic Interview of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump Is the Scariest Thing I’ve Seen in This Campaign."

Click here for a complete transcript of the Commander in Chief Forum.