You Won't Be Surprised

I didn’t watch the debate. I figured what was coming, and by all accounts, I was right. But this is what Charlie Pierce had to say. (I only quote Charlie Pierce rather than anyone else on this, because Charlie Pierce has a way with words that many others don’t.)

I thought that, given the roll he's been on, Romney would be able to keep both Snippy Willard and Dickhead Willard in check. I had no doubt that, because the nature of the event required that he mingle with actual carbon-based life forms, we undoubtedly would see English-as-a-Second-Language Willard. And we did. ("Binders full of women"?) And, because at least some of the questions were likely to be wild cards, there was a better than even chance that Zany Improv Willard would put in an appearance, as he did on the very first question of the night, when he told a young man named Jeremy that, "I want to make sure we keep our Pell Grant program going," when, in fact, one of the under-appreciated consequences of the overall zombie-eyed granny-starving onto which he signed when he picked his running mate is the fact that his running mate's "budget" would utterly devastate... wait for it... Pell Grants!

(I have to admit it: When the president let that fat, hanging curveball go by, I thought he was in for another long evening.)

But not even I expected Romney to let his entitled, Lord-of-the-Manor freak flag fly as proudly as he did on Tuesday night. […] That moment when he was hectoring the president about the president's pension made him look like someone to whom the valet has brought the wrong Mercedes.

"You'll get your chance in a moment. I'm still speaking."

[…]

It was a look at the real Willard Romney, the Bain cutthroat who could get rich ruining lives and not lose a moment's sleep. But those people are merely the anonymous Help. The guy he was speaking to on Tuesday night is a man of considerable international influence. Outside of street protestors, and that Iraqi guy who threw a shoe at George W. Bush, I have never seen a more lucid example of manifest public disrespect for a sitting president than the hair-curling contempt with which Romney invested those words. (I've certainly never seen one from another candidate.) He's lucky Barack Obama prizes cool over everything else. LBJ would have taken out his heart with a pair of salad tongs and Harry Truman would have bitten off his nose.

[…]

Romney bitched endlessly — endlessly — about the rules, and why this uppity fellow on the other stool was allowed to speak before he was spoken to, and why he didn't get to speak at length on whatever he wanted to speak on because, after all, he is the CEO of the stage.

[…]

The one thing nobody can ever say now is that they didn't know the exact character of Willard Romney, and exactly how he feels about The Help, including that member of The Help who currently holds the job that Romney believes should have been his by virtue of his god-kissed, golden life.

[…]

Those of us who lived under the barely distinguishable leadership of Willard Romney in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (God save it!) know very well that the emotional membrane separating Lofty Willard from Snippy Willard is thin indeed, and that the membrane separating Snippy Willard from Dickhead Willard is well-nigh translucent. Both of those membranes were tested fully here on Tuesday night […and] both of those membranes failed like rotting levees in a storm.

  Charlie Pierce

But, as he cautions Obama elsewhere…

And, no, "stabilizing the race" is not winning. Not when you've managed to fritter away a perfectly good working margin, thereby throwing several states well into the heart of the Margin of Chicanery.

  Charlie Pierce