Now that we've had almost a full day to take our Dramamine, and maybe some knockout-drops, we are ready to look back at the main GOP debate in Las Vegas and determine: who, among the Trumps and not-Trumps, managed to say out loud the vilest, nastiest, most inhumane bullshit that ragtag bunch of misanthropes could offer? We mean, obviously, it was probably Donald Trump, right? Is there anything that guy doesn't win?! Or might the answer surprise you? We polled each of the people in the chatcave today (Kaili is on vacation with the King of Spain, as Democrats are wont to do, and we didn't bother with the freelancers), and present, unvarnished and unedited, their considered opinions.
Chris Christie Is A Small, Little Man
Me, Rebecca Schoenkopf: I don't know why this struck me more than any of the others racing to outmacho their brethren and Carlyen, but Chris Christie's opening statement -- where he sneered, spittle flying, that Obama has "betrayed" us -- actually shocked me. Maybe it was because it was in such sharp contrast with John Kasich's "we're not blue states or red states, we're American states," "before we're Democrats and Republicans, we're Americans," but the open disdain for the sitting president of the United States actually outraged me. Actually, it wasn't even disdain; it was more dangerous than that. What is someone who betrays you? A traitor. And what is the punishment for traitors? Being hanged by the neck until dead.
Chris Christie is supposed to be the one who's not actually a lunatic, just a jerky yelling man. He went on to blame Barack Obama for the shutdown of the Los Angeles Unified School District the same day -- and nobody, including Wolf Blitzer, thought to mention that that LAUSD had shut down because of a hoax. THANKS OBAMA.
Guess he doesn't need your help any more, Barry, so as they say in Jersey go fuck yourself.
GOP Debate Audience Boos Hugh Hewitt Like He Is A Gay Soldier
CA Pinkham: For me, the vilest moment of Tuesday's GOP debate was, incredibly, not caused by any of the 847 candidates on the stage. Instead, the crowd starred in an impromptu production of Our Fuckheaded American Cousin, as the GOP voter base's bile-drenched Id reared its hideous maw. Moderator Hugh Hewitt pressed retired self-practicing neurosurgeon Ben Carson on his comments about bombing ISIS-controlled areas and pointed out -- quite reasonably -- that waging war the way Carson has talked about is guaranteed to result in the deaths of hundreds if not thousands of innocent children. The crowd lost its goddamn mind in one of the biggest boo moments of the night.
All the attention has gone to Carson saying (either to the audience's reaction, or to Hewitt himself) "You got it, you got it," which is fair -- but it obscures the sociopathic rot the crowd's reaction laid bare. Civilian deaths? Don't be such a fucking downer, Hugh! Let's instead talk about the splody shit with which we can pew pew them turr'ists until their heads go splat! The Republican lust for war doesn't have time for your salient points about inevitable collateral damage.
It's hard to conceive of a viler moment than that.
MURDER! DEATH! MORE DEATH AND MURDER!
Killing innocents in the EW BROWN parts of the world is just no big to any of these assholes. Ben Carson said he'd use his doctorin' skills to bomb the shit out of Middle Eastern civilians. Ted Cruz suggested he'd pull some magic carpet bombs out of his Cuban-Canadian ass, you know, those smart bombs that are shy around innocent children:
You would carpet bomb where ISIS is, not a city, but the location of the troops.
See, there are cities, and then there is ISIS, which is out off the interstate, next to the Cracker Barrel. Bomb that, not the kids. THANKS, TED CRUZ!
Donald Trump agrees with his earlier statements (surprise!) that he would "go after" terrorists' families, by which he means kill them, because "they do care, believe it or not, about their families' lives." That'll sure teach 'em a lesson on not doing terrorism! It'll be YOOOGE and TERRIFIC.
As for Syrian refugees, well, what do you expect from these sadistic fuckbiscuits? One moment that stuck out for us was Marco Rubio saying that "if we allow 9,999 Syrian refugees ... and all of them are good people, but we allow one person in who's an ISIS killer," well then, we guess that's the end of America. For real, that was the gist. Fuck all those other thousands of shiny, happy, suffering people.
By that logic, shouldn't we shut down ALL immigration? Hell, there are over 300,000,000 American citizens already here! What if one of them is a bad terrible dick of a person? What if one of them goes out and legally purchases a gun and decides to kill a bunch of schoolchildren in Newtown, Connecticut, or black churchgoers in Charleston, or students in Roseburg, Oregon?
Haha just kidding, it's Too Soon to talk about that stuff, and Muslims are scary.
Aren't Mideast Dictators An Important Part Of The Ecosystem?
Doktor Zoom: In an ugly vile debate among ugly vile candidates, one of the ugly vile moments that stood out for me was Wolf Blitzer's question about whether the candidates thought dictatorships in the Middle East had their good sides:
The last two presidents pursued a Middle East policy that supported toppling dictators to try to promote democracy.Senator Cruz, you have said the world would be safer today if Saddam Hussein were still in power in Iraq, Moammar Gadhafi ruled Libya, and Hosni Mubarak ruled Egypt. So would it be your policy to preserve dictatorships, rather than promoting democracy in the Middle East?
Cruz sort of dodged that at first, insisting that he believes in "a America first foreign policy" and that both Obama and Clinton "-- and, unfortunately, more than a few Republicans -- have gotten distracted from the central focus of keeping this country safe." Cruz insisted that Clinton (and, oh, yes, the actual president, Obama)
led NATO in toppling the government in Libya. They did it because they wanted to promote democracy ... and we were told then that there were these moderate rebels that would take over. Well, the result is, Libya is now a terrorist war zone run by jihadists.
Also, to our eternal shame, Cruz said, we failed to prop up Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, "who had been a reliable ally of the United States, of Israel," when Egyptians rose up against him. And what lesson did Cruz take away from this? A re-affirmation of the old unattributable foreign policy cliché that some leaders may be bastards, but they're our bastards:
Assad is a bad man. Gadhafi was a bad man. Mubarak had a terrible human rights record. But they were assisting us -- at least Gadhafi and Mubarak -- in fighting radical Islamic terrorists.And if we topple Assad, the result will be ISIS will take over Syria, and it will worsen U.S. national security interests.
So, hey, what are a few human rights violations when you're cracking down on terrorists? And journalists, and human rights campaigners, and international aid workers, and maybe, in other countries, a few nuns now and then? For all his neocon willingness to play Global Police, Marco Rubio at least got the history right:
Moammar Gadhafi and the revolt against Gadhafi was not started by the United States. It was started by the Libyan people. And the reason why I argued we needed to get involved is because he was going to go one way or the other.
Not that we're exactly in love with the idea of charging willy-nilly into dictatorships with guns blazing to bring freedom. We learned how well that worked in Iraq.
So yeah, we didn't like the slobbering over dictatorships and how useful they can be for us. And as we've mentioned, we also wish the whole crowd of idiots hadn't talked about ISIL as if they were uncanny X-Men who are unstoppable. Why would a presidential candidate want to stroke terrorists' egos?
