The skunk sprayed the stink

Update: Trump will accept election results if he wins.

This just in: Trump tweeted that "Crooked Hillary" was given the questions in advance of the debate. Of course, he offered no proof.

By BERRY CRAIG

AFT Local 1360

Melinda, my wife of nearly 38 years, suggested that debating Donald Trump is like facing a skunk.

You know the cantankerous critter is bound to spray the stink. You just don’t know when.

In the third-- and mercifully final—presidential debate, Trump managed to keep the stage fairly odor free for about half an hour. Then came the stench.

Hillary Clinton called Trump Vladimir Putin’s “puppet.” His goat gotten, Trump started talking over her: “No puppet, no puppet. You’re the puppet. No, you’re the puppet!”

Melinda almost fell off a kitchen table chair laughing. She wondered if Trump might resort to that old grade school standby: “Oh, yeah? I’m rubber, and you’re glue--everything bounces off me and sticks on you!”

Predictably, Trump, his dander up, kept squirting the smelly stuff. Rapid-fire, he called Clinton a liar. Melinda anticipated “pants on fire!”

Trump dissed her as "such a nasty woman." He glowered. He grimaced. He smirked. He bent down and intoned “wrong!” into the mike and did his best Alec Baldwin impersonation.

But, substantively, he was nowhere more skunk-like than when he refused to say flat out he'd accept the election results.

"I will look at it at the time," Trump hedged. "I’ll keep you in suspense." 

So Trump hinted that he might not go along with who the body politic wants to be our next president. I could almost hear the cheering from the fever swamps and sloughs of tea party Trump land.

Stay tuned until Nov. 8, says The Donald. 

The last time a big chunk of the American electorate refused to accept how an election turned out was 1860.

The white South, scared that Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans would end slavery, threatened to exit the Union if he won. When he did, Dixie departed—after insisting “Crooked Abe’s” win wasn’t legit. (Okay, the Confederates actually slammed Lincoln as “a Baboon Despot,” “the Illinois Ape,” “King Abraham I” and worse.)

The South—big time Trump country today—brought on the most lethal war in our history.

I’m not for a minute predicting a second Civil War. But check out this video of a Trump “patriot” and this one and this story and this story.  

After characterizing Trump’s election dodge “horrible,” Clinton reminded him that we are “a country based on laws.”

Doesn’t Trump say he’s a “law and order” guy?

Anyway, Trump’s a Republican like Abraham Lincoln. Okay, definitely not one like Lincoln.    

“Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt,” Lincoln supposedly said.  

If the Great Emancipator did say it, the Great Groper proved him right. Melinda and I can’t wait for Saturday Night Live.