Ten Things I Learned from the GOP Debate

1. The GOP can't even walk onto a stage without screwing it up.

(Dr. Ben Carson, calm center of the storm, stands around for a while offstage after his name is called. Logjam ensues.)









2. Marco Rubio needs to find a new line of work.  Get out now, that's all one can advise.  Otherwise we'll hear about him hunkered in a corner of a padded cell muttering "Barack Obama knows exactly what he's doing" over and over and over.  He's a well-groomed young self-starter type and will land on his feet.  Opening act at a Tony Robbins seminar seems about right.

3.  Donald Trump is really several small children inside a suit made in China.  Look at his hands.  He has the tiniest hands of any grown man I've ever seen.  IT EXPLAINS EVERYTHING.  It's why he whines all the time.  It's why he can't answer a question. What is your health care plan?  "It will be so great!"  How will you build your wall?  "It will be so huge!"  How will you pay for it?  "Mexico!"  Only the infantile base of the right wing of the GOP could love such a toddler.

4.  Jeb Bush can't do much, but he can navigate his way onto a debate stage.  I'm sure his mother was very proud.

5.  Can anybody track what John Kasich says?  Does it turn into white noise after a few seconds for you, too?  Has 90 seconds ever lasted so long?

6.  If Republicans had a brain in their head they'd get behind Chris Christie immediately and ride that Clydesdale all the way to the finish line.  He's the only natural politician up there.  He can debate, he can work a rope-line, he has a certain weird charisma.  If the other "establishment" candidates bailed out IMMEDIATELY and supported him, he could compete in a three-way with Trump and Cruz (ew), and it would be handed to him at a brokered convention.  They won't, and he won't, so it's a moot point.  He committed the cardinal sin: He got along with the President JUST ONCE (Hurricane Sandy, the HUG), and said sin cannot be forgiven in the weirdly eschatolgical theology that strangles today's Republican Party.

7.  Cruz is a shitbird.  Everybody knows it.  He can lie about the CNN/Ben Carson-dropping-out thing knowing perfectly well everybody will find out it's a lie and he just doesn't care.  He's pathological that way, and his supporters love him for it.

8.  It doesn't matter how much money Jeb Bush has in the warchest.  Nobody likes him, not the left, not the right, not the center.  Who doesn't enjoy seeing him get shushed by the other toddler on the stage?  Bring Mom out again, Jeb.  Nothing says commander-in-chief more.

9.  "Barack Obama knows exactly what he's doing."  I kind of already knew that, but it's good to have it confirmed by the Republicans.  "Barack Obama knows exactly what he is doing."

10.  So why is anybody still voting Republican?  Tax breaks?  White Nationalism?  A mythic sense of the grandeur of this country, rooted not so much in the past as in Hollywood's re-creation of the past?  That's it. Or as Hellboy would say:

Murica.