Mark Cuban in the Front Row?

Vincent J. Curtis

26 Sept 2016

Apparently, it’s true.  Hillary Clinton is going to sit Mark Cuban in the front row of the auditorium during her debate with Donald Trump tonight.  I don’t know why this is being allowed.

Mark Cuban is not a participant in the debate.  All he can do is jeer and make faces at Donald Trump as a means of distracting him, and that is why Hillary is putting him in the front row.  I hope the NBC will focus a camera on him continuously so that there will be a record of his conduct, which is intended to be inappropriate.  I doubt that NBC will, however.

Earlier in the week, when Hillary made the Cuban announcement Trump threatened to play tit-for-tat and have Gennifer Flowers sit next to Mark Cuban.  Juanita Broadderick and then Paula Jones wanted invitations also so that they could sit with Gennifer.  The media reacted with horror and pretended that Trump had initiated a pre-emptive strike against Hillary.  How dare he invite Gennifer Flowers?

It is a sign of how long the Clinton corruption has polluted American politics, that one can write the names of three private women without having to explain anything about them.  Their names are just in the public memory because of their association with the Clintons from nearly twenty years ago.

A typical exchange occurred on Fox News Sunday, when host Chris Wallace interrogated Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Mike Pence about the story of placing Gennifer Flowers in the front row.  There was no mention of her sitting right next to Mark Cuban.  Wallace took on the air that this seemed to be another of Donald Trump’s outrageous stunts that tend to prove his unfitness for office.  Wallace made no mention of the proposal being a tit-for-tat, and for his part Mike Pence didn’t either.  Pence finally said that none of the many women in Bill Clinton’s past were going to be invited to the debate by the Trump campaign.

Later in the day, on the Sunday edition of Special Report, Wallace said that the Trump campaign were “running away” from inviting any of Bill’s women to the debate.  He made it sound as though Trump were afraid of something.  We have yet to see in this campaign an occasion where Trump shied from a fight, over anything.  Yellow journalism can be subtle at times, but its frequency has degraded the public’s view of journalism, and it exists even at Fox.

After Mike Pence, as a kind of equivalence, Wallace then interviewed a staffer from the Hillary campaign.  Tim Kaine wasn’t available, and neither was Hillary, apparently.  So, Wallace interviews a Hillary staffer - who can’t be held responsible for anything he says or be blameworthy for things he doesn’t know.  He can offer the most outrageous defenses of the indefensible, and it isn’t Hillary or Tim Kaine’s face saying the words, or being the one directly confronted with what he said, as Pence was.

The staffer, Joel Benenson, was asked by Wallace what he thought of Trump’s first inviting Gennifer Flowers and then disinviting her, with no mention by either of the Mark Cuban stunt initiated by Hillary Clinton.  Wallace then raised the Mark Cuban matter, and Benenson responded by praising Cuban, ragged the puck for a while, condemned Donald Trump and then stopped talking.  Wallace moved on to another topic.

This was a small exercise about small things of monumental importance.  If Cuban is a non-factor, as he should be, all the news will be about the debate.  The debate will wipe out the news that the reason Hillary wasn’t recommended for indictment was because it was Barack Obama she was being irresponsible with.  That Barack Obama lied about not knowing of Hillary’s private server is also news that will be buried.  The news that Hillary tried to pull a cheap trick by putting Mark Cuban in the front row to distract Trump will be gone.

But like rocks that are still rocks whether or not they are covered by water, when the tide recedes, these rocks will be exposed again.

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