When A Village Loses Its Idiot

The evening started out well enough. I went to Talmud class, only we didn't have Talmud class. Instead, we participated in restoring a Torah. It's a pretty big deal to go through the ritual of "helping" to restore a letter in a Torah scroll that has been deemed unkosher because the letters are flaking off or the scroll itself is damaged.

I took Little Miss on Sunday to participate in the mitzvah, and despite a brief meltdown, she watched our sofer (scribe) intently as he inked in her letter. But tonight, I got to do it myself. This particular Torah scroll is between 100-125 years old. It's in relatively good shape, but much of it needs re-inking, a very arduous process performed by someone specially trained to work on a Torah. Usually, you send the Torah out.  We at Beth Jacob happen to have a staff member who also happens to be a sofer.  So we participated as a class, understanding that this is a sacred moment that connects us not as a class, but as part of a long line of people who have interacted with this scroll in one way or another. 

Which was the perfect lead in to the debate....from the sublime to the ridiculous. 

I will admit I was live feeding on Facebook, mostly with my cousins, and while satisfying to some degree, it was also kinda scary. Even though the libertarian/former Republicans are pretty much supporting Hillary, I found some of the commentary amongst some of my less liberal leaning friends disturbing. I mean, let's not pretend we didn't notice the sniffling Trump. I know I'm not the only one who made cocaine jokes. But these people only saw Hillary as left of Lucifer. Trump was yammering and yammering and yammering....and saying absolutely nothing coherent...and Hillary was the failure? What are these people thinking. 

I love Charles Durning, but this character sums up what we saw at the debate this evening:

Donald Trump had some great lines, like the one about how Hillary doesn't look presidential. And a guy with a rat's nest on his head does? Or the part when he said,

Well I have much better judgment than she does. There's no question about that. I also have a much better temperament than she has.

Okay, maybe he's really smoking crack and not doing coke before the debate. Hard to tell which one.

In a lot of ways, I was disappointed with the debate. Not because Lester Holt (whom I generally like) was a total wuss, and not because I thought Hillary was unprepared (she was very prepared) but because Donald Trump came off like a total jerk. He had no facts, no statistical information, no grasp on reality, no substance. i wanted him to be, at the very least, prepared to debate his positions. He was not.

Somewhere in the United States, a village is missing its idiot. It could be Manhattan or it could be Palm Beach. Doesn't matter. Donald Trump has proven that money cannot buy smarts and he lacks any semblance of smarts. How could he stand there for ninety frickin' minutes and say absolutely nothing?

What he telegraphed in those ninety minutes, besides that he is a moron, is that he is a dangerous moron. 

CLINTON: And, in fact, his cavalier attitude about nuclear weapons is so deeply troubling. That is the number-one threat we face in the world. And it becomes particularly threatening if terrorists ever get their hands on any nuclear material. So a man who can be provoked by a tweet should not have his fingers anywhere near the nuclear codes, as far as I think anyone with any sense about this should be concerned. 

TRUMP: That line's getting a little bit old, I must say. I would like to... 

CLINTON: It's a good one, though. It well describes the problem.

(LAUGHTER)

TRUMP: It's not an accurate one at all. It's not an accurate one. So I just want to give a lot of things -- and just to respond. I agree with her on one thing. The single greatest problem the world has is nuclear armament, nuclear weapons, not global warming, like you think and your -- your president thinks.

Nuclear is the single greatest threat. Just to go down the list, we defend Japan, we defend Germany, we defend South Korea, we defend Saudi Arabia, we defend countries. They do not pay us. But they should be paying us, because we are providing tremendous service and we're losing a fortune. That's why we're losing -- we're losing -- we lose on everything. I say, who makes these -- we lose on everything. All I said, that it's very possible that if they don't pay a fair share, because this isn't 40 years ago where we could do what we're doing. We can't defend Japan, a behemoth, selling us cars by the million...

Can anyone explain what he just said? 

Folks, a lot of global leaders are watching to see what we elect for the next president. To many, Donald Trump's big advantage is that he is an ignoramus, that if elected, he is unpredictable and temperamental. His inability to appropriately respond to a tweet opens the door for attacks on US installations world-wide, and in America itself. If you want to talk about scary stuff, go think about the advantage a Putin or a Xi Jinping would do with that opening. If nothing else, they have learned, by Trump's own admission, that flattery gets you everywhere.

On the other hand, Hillary is a seasoned professional, not the person they want in the oval office. 

And now, a taste of a future Trump administration:

The Wifely Person's Tip o'the Week

Would you let a guy who once read THE IDIOT'S GUIDE TO SURGERY

do your liver transplant?