Another Boffo Performance By The Republican Theater Of The Absurd
I have no idea how many independents or voters who have not decided whether Barack Obama deserves reelection are watching the Republican presidential debates. Party bigs must be hoping that the number is small because the slate of wannabes almost to the last man (you too, Michele) are proving time and again their fitness for high comedy and unfitness for high office.
Last night’s rumble in Detroit was the ninth of an extraordinary 23 scheduled debates, and if those bigs are smart, they’ll try to pull the plug on every damned forthcoming one.
This is because Mitt Romney yet again stood head and shoulders above the competition despite the fact he is disliked if not openly loathed by the GOP’s right-wing base and kept his act together all evening save for a truly loony comment that Democrats hate profitable companies because they want to regulate them. Oh, and dismissed a question about his perpetual flip-flopping by pointing out that he had been married for 42 years.
The hands down loser was Rick Perry, who in the most painful moment of his many painful moments in the debates, actually forgot the third of the three cabinet agencies that he would eliminate, prompting one pundit to write that “it was like watching a thoroughbred get euthanized on the track. It was shocking, grisly and impossible to look away.”
Perry, you may recall, was going to save the GOP from Romney after Michele Bachmann swooned and Sarah Palin quit (again), but his polling numbers are now so low that he is in Bachmann territory, which is to say nearly subterranean.
Despite the dearth of tough questions, the candidates across the board refused to provide real answers, notably when addressing health-care reform. Understanding that there was a ridiculous 30-second time limit, none of them offered comprehensive plans but did suggest fixes that for the most part are already are in place under ObamaCare, which apparently few of them actually understand.
Romney, if course, is the exception, having pushed through a health-care reform plan while Massachusetts governor that became the basis for ObamaCare, an achievement that he continues to run from because today’s GOP is openly hostile to people who cannot afford health care, let alone the elderly and the infirm.
Herman Cain was cheered lustily (pun intended) by the debate audience, which seemed to not mind that a guy who believes sticking his hand up a woman’s dress in an effort to grab her snatch in return for the promise of a job is not exactly presidential behavior (Monica Lewinsky already had a job), while the journalists who had the bad taste to bring up the serial sexual harassment allegations against the former pizza exec defaulted to being cowards and dropped the issue after the audience booed them.
Cain, meanwhile, continues to bring to mind a certain half-term governor who decided that making buckets of money took precedence over saving the republic from our Islamofascist president. He has shown no capacity for mastering the nuances of public policy but certainly seems to be enjoying the ride. While it lasts.
Jon Huntsman, like Romney, put on a credible performance (Go Mormons Go!) but continues to be an also-ran because he is much too moderate — which is to say sane — for a party base that lustily cheered Perry during the first debate when he bragged about the number of people he has executed in Texas.
Oh, there were two other winners last night: Newt Gingrich, who has positioned himself to be the go-to guy if the nominating convention deadlocks and completely loses its mind. And of course President Obama.
14 Responses to “Another Boffo Performance By The Republican Theater Of The Absurd”
For a change you exaggerate, they were all pretty good except for Perry and the other guy, I forget his name.
dduck:
You must mean . . . nah, I can’t think of his name either.
Quite telling that duck doesn’t include Bachmann or Santorum (or Gingrich or Cain) to his ‘all pretty good except’ list.
Huntsman is the only grownup with a plan vying for the nomination and he’s unacceptable to most Republicans.
embarrassing.
Be grateful that the whole world IS NOT watching.
Too bad Perry looked over at Ron Paul for a bailout. I disagree strongly with Ron Paul on many issues, but I respect him as a person and an intellectual. Perry, on the other hand, is a complete idiot.
The polls tell a story. For a sitting Prez, Obmana is hurting. He has less than a year to pull a rabbit out his hat.
The Repub debate stage is filled with a bunch of loons, but Romney is not one of them. Moderate Repubs and Indies will asure that Mitt gets the nomination. At that point all the far right’s Repub’s will fight off the nausea and support him, also.
Most all of us, I think, have a proclivity for writing about how we want things to be, not necessarily how they actually are.
Love the last line….
Newt as the… “better a known quantity than one of these idiots” candidate
Don’t they hate profitable companies? If I had a nickel for every TMV writer complaining about for-profit health care, for-profit public works contractors, or for-profit anything-else-that-seems-to-come-up, I’d have myself a tidy profit. Enough, I imagine, to fuel the next round of complaints.
FNMA is asking for another $7 billion for this quarter. I guess they were not regulated enough.
BTW: according to the Laugh-O-Meter attached to my TV, Cain got the biggest laugh last night when he said: “the trouble with Dodd-Frank, is Dodd and Frank.
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Thanks
archangel/ dr.e
Sorry, if I attacked anyone.
Nobody can NEVER fail Rick Perry on a lie detector test, he could not remember her name in the morning.
I thought they had memory advisors in the White House for Republican presidents? Just incase the decider needed to decide something.
Just one question…Has he remembered yet what the third cabinet agencies he would get rid of?
Very funny, he said it later in the program.
Yes, he remembered that he wants to eliminate the Department of Energy (you know, the guys who would be able to allow the drilling on U.S. territory that Perry wants to do to revamp the economy). When are the moderators for these debates going to start putting together some of the drivel the candidates are spouting and show that quite often they have either contradicted themselves or suggested intrinsically impossible suggestions?