What I noticed on the night of 19 December’s Democrat Debate, starting late on a cold Saturday night:

Hillary did her homework -- clearly her debate-practice team grilled her and drilled her -- she was spot on her talking points. Sanders is also quite earnest, though of course I disagree with everything he says (except admiring his earnest straightforwardness), and O'Malley was also on point.  Of the three, O'Malley struck me as the one that would do the least horrid damage, were he to be the nominee.

Of course, Hillary cleverly used Star Wars close "May the Force be with you"  to put the whipped cream on her batch of  well-salted, well-nutted, well-peppered lies, half-truths, grotesqueries and absurd charges that are more accurately stated as disgusting failures and scandals  that have been  harrumphed about for the entire  catastrophic regime of the worst president ever in the history of these United States. No one brought up her criminal activities, no one addressed her foundation's slush funds, her husband and her huge and illegal favors for foreign governments and powers, her favoritism for big donors, her lies on and off the campaign trail.

If she were an unknown, I'd have listened respectfully to her acting and dramatic reproduction of her vaunted chickteam's coaching. Her voice is a giveaway -- it was harsh and nasty, hardly the mellifluous melody her handlers like to pretend she delivers. The strain of the campaign trail is showing -- though for once she was wearing an outfit that showed her legs (briefly) and that wasn't an abomination against the world of fashion since 1950.  She behaved with decorum, did not make faces, and held her own -- albeit  so much was an exaggeration of the utter foul-up she produced in her tenure as Secretary of State -- only alluded to several times by Sanders as the screw-up that resulted from the  humiliating kill of Qaddafi- - a humongous mistake, as is the  effort to  squander Assad rather than off ISIS.

She is still, alas, massively unlikable, but one can forgive that, if one has not sat, stupefied, by her endless lies and cover-ups, her dissembling and self-aggrandizing

The questions and the questioner were to my mind not bad - -Martha [and ABC] was pretty tough on target, and did not let the candidates run away with the stage or the podium. She held the three to "the rules."

The paucity of candidates meant that the  questions did not set them one against the other in what they slightingly call a "cage match" with reference to the GOP debates -- but they did actually differ with one another on any number of issues. How to dampen the Second Amendment, open our doors to endless skeins of unknowns and unknowable "refugees," the importance of giving everything under the sun away for free, without accountability or resources to back up such outlandishness.

Though the performers were above their usual sub-par threshold, this was essentially a placeholder.

Still distracting if too telling to my eyes was the absence of flag pins and US flags onstage altogether.  A bare bones stage with bare-bones candidates. Whistling in the winds of despair, after the hairy regime of Mr. Bad-Golfer Wastrel Android Partier-in-Chief.