Looks Like I Missed Another Debate

Yeah, I can't watch Jerry Springer, either.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaanyway...

I hope that does'nt spoil your breakfast.

Where's Babs?

The policies themselves don’t matter as much as the Sturm und Drang: either you are finally convinced that the other guy is a cretin after your guy has yelled enough, or you just stop caring about all the loud men yelling and no longer run the risk of suspecting that your guy might be a cretin, too.

But this debate veered fully into absurdity somewhere around the third time that Donald Trump told the actual truth about things that actually happened in actual history and was booed by the audience for his trouble.

[...]

From there, the madness spread through the debate: a great circle of abuse spun around fast enough to fling all sense away.

[...]

The crosstalk overwhelmed all comers and CBS moderator John Dickerson lost all control (apart from Carson and Kasich, whose brand-management plans forbade them from joining in).

  Guardian

And neither of whom are anywhere near being able to take the title anyway. So why put yourself in that position?

It’s hard to tell which is sadder: that millions of people are stuck with these jerks; or that millions of people want to be.

That's easy for me: that millions of people want to be.

That said, the most depressing of all possible acknowledgements is that it probably doesn’t matter what a mess this was.

On the contrary, it probably brought out more voters. And that's what the GOP needs.

Trump and Bush’s fiery exchanges [...] were as personal and vicious as any moment so far in the 2016 presidential election. The Republican frontrunner ferociously challenged the Bush family legacy and GOP orthodoxy on foreign policy. At the end of one clash, Ohio governor John Kasich was left slack-jawed. “This is just crazy,” he said.

  Guardian

Probably wasn't as exciting as that. Was it?

Trump openly accused the Bush administration of knowingly lying about the presence of weapons of mass destruction in order to justify an invasion of Iraq in 2003, a step beyond anything that most Democrats, let alone any Republican, have said.

Only if you're talking about presidential candidates.

“George Bush made a mistake, we can make mistakes. But that one was a beauty.”

He added, forcefully: “They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction – there were none. And they knew there were none. There were no weapons of mass destruction.”

Bush fired back, showing his most fight in any debate yet.

“I am sick and tired of him going after my family,” he said. “While Donald Trump was building a reality TV show, my brother was building a security apparatus to keep us safe and I’m proud of what he did.”

The two men even squabbled about Bush’s mother. The former Florida governor said proudly, “My mother was the strongest person I know.”

Trump’s response: “Maybe she should be running.”

Zing! And really, what is this with Jeb and his Mommy? Does he ever talk about his wife in such glowing terms?

All the while, Trump was lustily booed by the audience.

Which just egged him on, no doubt.

Eventually, Marco Rubio jumped into the scrum in defense of George W Bush but Trump fired back: “I lost hundreds of friends. The World Trade Center came down during the reign of George Bush.”

He had hundreds of friends? That's a bald-faced lie. But a great rant. Except, why attack Jeb? He's nowhere near close to the top of the pack.

Rubio’s response was to cast blame for 9/11 on Bill Clinton’s failure to kill Osama bin Laden during his administration.

You've got to be kidding me.

Cruz claimed that Rubio has said in a Spanish-language TV interview that he would not revoke Obama’s executive actions. Rubio responded: “I don’t know how he knows what I said on Univision because he doesn’t speak Spanish.”

Cruz trotted out his rudimentary Spanish language skills as disproof.

I wonder how many of their supporters just found out these guys have Latin blood. Oh wait, those people are Trump supporters.

[Cruz] reiterated an attack that he has frequently used on the stump, saying that the New York real estate mogul has spent most of his life as a liberal Democrat who supports socialized medicine and partial birth abortion.

Trump responded by telling Cruz: “You are the single biggest liar. You are probably worse than Jeb Bush.”

He's on the TV. And he knows people are lapping him up. What do you expect? If these other guys think getting him to show his "true self" is in any way going to diminish his support, they're dreaming. Or maybe they are just trying to emulate him since he's top of the polls.

Except Kasich and Ben Carson, who's still going on his own path in his own world.

Ben Carson used a quote from Stalin – that in order to destroy a healthy body “you have to undermine three principles: their spiritual life, their patriotism and their morality” – that appears to be utterly and entirely fabricated.

  Guardian

It seems the blood red curtain was a fitting backdrop.

The febrile mood continued, at times closer to gladiatorial combat in the coliseum than a policy debate over the future of the nation.

At one point, Kasich warned: “I think we’re fixin’ to lose the election to Hillary Clinton if we don’t stop this.”

[...]

The debate took place only a few hours after the death of Scalia. The six candidates on stage held a moment of silence before the debate began and then stood almost unanimously against the Senate confirming any Obama nominee to replace him in the next 11 months. As Trump put it, Senate Republicans should “delay, delay, delay”.

And they will. They don't need to be told.

George W Bush is set to campaign at his brother’s side in South Carolina, where Republicans vote on Saturday.

Is that a good idea?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.