I expected fireworks in this debate and it did not disappoint.  After those tapes were released of Donald Trump making crude remarks about women, it was obvious that things were going to get ugly.

The first half hour of the debate really got down into the dirt.  It was mostly personal.  I am not even sure that they shook hands at the beginning.

I won’t go over the political issues much.  We all know that neither one of them is a libertarian or even close to it.  Hillary Clinton is the opposite of libertarianism in almost every way.  Trump is more of a wildcard.  He says a lot of bad things, but he at least shows some honesty and gives us a little hope of a less interventionist foreign policy.

I don’t understand why Clinton attacked Trump personally at the beginning (or at all).  She has most of the entire establishment media on her side doing her dirty work.  Anyone paying attention knows about the recent Trump comments from 11 years ago.  But as soon as Clinton attacks him on this, it opens her up to being attacked for her decades of criminality.

I knew Trump was not going to go down easy.  He didn’t go as far as, “Your husband is a rapist, and what happened to Vince Foster?”, but he did go after her pretty hard.  I know some people will like him even less, if that is possible, but he had to attack her.  He can be crude and brash, yet is probably honest for the most part.  She is a criminal in many aspects, both politically and personally.

In terms of foreign policy, especially with Syria, there was a lot to like from a libertarian perspective.  Syria is a disaster and much of it is due to Obama and Clinton.  They were already trying to overthrow Assad when Clinton was still Secretary of State.  It is ridiculous that they are trying to overthrow a guy who has kept relative peace and allowed religious freedom, unlike Saudi Arabia (the Clinton Foundation donors).

Trump was asked for his comments on what Mike Pence had said about Syria and Russia.  Trump said he hadn’t spoken to him and disagreed with those comments.  I know a lot of people laugh at this, but it made me like Trump a little bit more.  I knew Pence was a mistake, and it was done to appease the Republican establishment.  Pence was not a good life insurance policy for Trump.

At this point, I don’t know how the undecideds will react to this debate.  Perhaps these attacks will convince some people to not vote at all, which is just as important.  Believe it or not, there might be some people who do not know a lot about Clinton’s emails and her other lies.  I don’t know if Trump damaged her enough to convince any significant number of people to not vote for her, but I highly doubt that anything Clinton said did anything because the establishment media has already said everything bad there is to say about Trump.

Also, I thought it was smart for Trump to criticize the “moderators”, who are so obviously in bed with Clinton and out to get Trump.

This is only going to get uglier and we still don’t know if Wikileaks has anything good.

From a libertarian perspective, it is encouraging that Trump is bringing up some of these valid questions of the U.S. government’s interventionist foreign policy.

On the other hand, the fact that everything is so personal (and about personalities) is not all that positive.  It actually is something of a distraction from the big issues of war, the Federal Reserve, massive debt, massive unfunded liabilities, and big government in general.  But regardless, at least it isn’t boring.