The Republican Presidential debate in Las Vegas is over; long (for a few days) live the Republican Presidential debate in Las Vegas. It’s a truism in American politics: first there is a debate that people watch and digest. And then the pundits start analyzing and a conventional wisdom begins to settle in. It may not be unanimous at first, but a consensus soon emerges about who had a “good night” and who didn’t and who was stagnant.

Two certainties: the rivalry between Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz was on stark display. But what seemed to be true hatred and disdain between front runner Donald Trump and the past-time-conventional-wisdom-from runner former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush was even more stark. One of the biggest winners: CNN, which stewarded a content-heavy, well-paced debate with serious moderators.

Here’s sampling of what’s being said by news organizations, weblogs, and on Twitter. These are excerpts. Go to the links to read these takes in their entirety.

Bloomberg Politics:

Personal attacks, withering ripostes, competing plans to combat terror and a surprise declaration of party loyalty marked a Republican debate in which candidates sought to reshuffle the pack six weeks before the first contest of the 2016 presidential race.
The last, most contentious Republican debate of the year ended Tuesday night with front-runner Donald Trump reiterating his pledge to forego an independent bid for the presidency if he fails to win the nomination.

“I am totally committed to the Republican party. I feel very honored to be the front runner,” he said. “I will do everything in my power to beat Hillary Clinton.”

Trump, who has made that pledge once before but subsequently waffled on it, made his statement at the end of a debate in which he joined President Barack Obama and Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton as targets of fierce attacks at a televised debate.

The fifth Republican debate marked the first time the candidates have met since two deadly terrorist attacks—in Paris on Nov. 13 and in in San Bernardino, California on Dec. 2—and it offered the starkest-yet display of the split between the party’s hawks and its more libertarian-leaning candidates over American security at home and abroad.

There were sharp disagreements on immigration and refugee policy and how to combat terrorism overseas.

In one particularly sharp exchange, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie called Obama a “feckless weakling” and promised to shoot down Russian planes “If you are in favor of World War III,” retorted Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, “you have your candidate.”

The first attacks of the incendiary CNN/Facebook debate, held at the Venetian casino in Las Vegas, focused on the front-runner:

“Donald is great at the one-liners, but he is a chaos candidate and he’d be a chaos president,” former Florida Governor Jeb Bush said. “He would not be the commander in chief we need to keep our country safe.” Later as the two tangled over airtime, Bush snapped at Trump: “You’re not going to be able to insult your way to the presidency.”

The back-and-forth between the two took at times took on a a so’s-your-mother quality.

The Washington Post:

The Republican presidential contenders on Tuesday night framed their final debate of the year around a single question: Which of them is best equipped — by background, tough-mindedness and leadership abilities — to protect the country against terrorism?

Their focus reflected the reality that the nation itself has been riveted on that issue in the wake of attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif. — the latter carried out by an American citizen and his Pakistani wife, who had been living what appeared to be ordinary lives in their community.

“We have people across this country who are scared to death,” said New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. “Because I could tell you this, as a former federal prosecutor, if a center for the developmentally disabled in San Bernardino, California, is now a target for terrorists, that means everywhere in America is a target for these terrorists.”

If the mood of the evening was dire to the point of being apocalyptic, it also presented the candidates with an opportunity to draw sharp contrasts in their prescriptions for eradicating the threat, whether it comes from the Islamic State abroad or from homegrown enemies.

Celebrity billionaire Donald J. Trump, the front-runner in the race and the beneficiary of many Republicans’ desire for an anti-establishment outsider, was not the dominant presence he has been in past debates. The other contenders were jockeying as much against one another as the figure who has overshadowed them for the past six months.

The Los Angeles Times:

Political fallout from terrorist attacks in San Bernardino and Paris dominated a scrappy Republican presidential debate Tuesday in Las Vegas as rivals of Donald Trump tried to dislodge the New York business mogul from the front-runner’s spot.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush clashed repeatedly with Trump over strategy to keep the nation safe from terrorism.

“Donald is great at the one-liners, but he’s a chaos candidate, and he’d be a chaos president,” Bush said as he denounced Trump’s proposal to ban Muslims from entering the U.S. until the government gets a handle on the threat from jihadist terrorists.

Trump, in turn, belittled Bush, calling his campaign “a total disaster” and defending his own proposal.

“We’re not talking about religion,” Trump said. “We’re talking about security.”

With nine candidates lined up on stage at the Venetian Casino Resort, multiple subplots emerged as Trump rivals fought to stand out as potential alternatives to the brash New Yorker who has overshadowed them for months while tapping into deep anxieties of many Republican voters.

The New York Times’ Frank Bruni:

Someone needs to explain carpets to Ted Cruz.

They’re continuous stretches of material, usually rectangular, sometimes round. They’re not staggered, interrupted, with stops, starts, holes and sharp jags so that they smother and blot out only the evil bits of floor but leave adjacent, innocent ones untouched.

When you call for carpet bombing, as Cruz did again on Tuesday night, you are not outlining a strategy of pinpoint targeting or of any discernment.

You are sounding big and bold and advocating something indiscriminate. That’s the nature of a carpet. You can’t pretend otherwise.

Unless you’re Cruz, who can pretend just about anything.

“You would carpet bomb where ISIS is, not a city, but the location of the troops,” he said, as if there’s no mingling and the fighters of the Islamic State are somehow clustered apart from everyone they control, extinguished with the mere dropping of a rug.

“The object isn’t to level a city,” he added, never specifying how he would separate the good edifices and actors from the bad.

That’s some magic carpet.

And it was a prime example of the bluster and oversimplification on vivid, infuriating display in this Republican presidential debate, the fifth.

It was dominated as none of the four before it by one word, one syllable — “safe,” which was uttered so regularly that it was essentially the heartbeat of the debate.

In the wake of the Paris carnage, following the San Bernardino massacre, on a day when the country’s second-largest school district told children to stay home so that they wouldn’t be victims of violence, Americans wanted to know when and how they’d ever feel unafraid again.

And each of the nine contenders on the stage had one goal above all others: to convince viewers that he or she could be the agent of that fiercely desired security. That he or she could bring back “safe.”

But many of the aspirants had additional aims: to wound the rivals for the nomination who stood most directly in their way. As the night wore on, it degenerated into tedious, often puerile quarrels: between Cruz and Marco Rubio; between Rubio and Rand Paul; between Jeb Bush and Donald Trump.

The Daily Beast:

Carpet-bombing with no regard for civilian casualties. Murdering the possibly-innocent families of terrorists just to make a point. The line between official U.S. policy and action movie fantasy was unfortunately blurred during the Republican debate on Tuesday night, when Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, the frontrunners for the nomination—Trump with 33 percent in the polls, Cruz with 16—tried to out-macho one another on foreign policy.

The result was both candidates doubling down on strategies that involve war crimes.

Cruz has often said that he wants to “carpet-bomb ISIS into oblivion,” joking that we’ll find out of “sand can glow in the dark” in the process.

Asked by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, “Does that mean leveling the ISIS capital of Raqqa in Syria, where there are hundreds of thousands of civilians?”

Cruz replied, “what it means is using overwhelming airpower to utterly and completely destroy ISIS.”

By way of example, he pointed to the first Gulf War, when “we carpet-bombed them for 37 days, saturation bombing, after which our troops went in and in a day and a half, mopped up what was left of the Iraqi army.”

The architects of that Gulf War effort, which featured the first major use of precision-guided bombs, would probably disagree that it was was “saturation” or “carpet” bombing. And according to the International Criminal Court, war crimes include “intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population.” Cruz said the objective would be to kill members of ISIS, not civilians, but there’s no such thing as a precise, narrowly-targeted carpet-bombing campaign. The tactic, which began in the Spanish Civil War and flowered fully in World War II, is to drop thousands of munitions on a single area—and flatten in. It is the opposite of precise.

Not long after Cruz’s exchange, Trump was asked a question by Josh Jacob, an earnest, yellow sweater vest-wearing student from Georgia Tech. He wanted to know how Trump justified his assertion that the U.S. should kill the families of terrorists, when that “violates the principle of distinction between combatants and family members.”

He asked, “How would intentionally killing innocent civilians set us apart from ISIS?”

Trump puffed up like a blowfish. “We have to be much tougher and stronger than we’ve been,” he said. He pointed to the San Bernardino attack, arguing that people who knew the terrorist husband and wife no doubt were aware that they were up to no good. “They knew exactly what was going on,” he said.

The Huffington Post had a huge amount of coverage. Here’s one small excerpt:

The long-simmering feud between Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) finally broke open Tuesday night at the fifth Republican presidential debate in Las Vegas, with several heated exchanges on topics of national security, the fight against terror and immigration.
It was not immediately clear whether either candidate vying for second place in the race for the GOP nomination, behind real estate mogul Donald Trump, landed enough punches to bring the other down.
Cruz defended his Senate vote to curtail National Security Agency surveillance programs, including the bulk collection of Americans’ phone metadata, on the grounds that it protected rights and “strengthened the tools of national security and law enforcement to go after terrorists.” The Texas firebrand labeled Rubio’s repeated criticisms of that vote “knowingly false,” calling his tactics “Alinsky-like” and comparing them to President Barack Obama.
Rubio, however, argued that by voting to end the NSA’s metadata collection, Cruz weakened America’s ability to fight terrorism, stripping NSA access to phone records that may stop future attacks.
“The terrorist that attacked us in San Bernardino was an American citizen,” Rubio said, referring to this month’s mass shooting in California. “I bet you we wish we would’ve had access to five years of his records.”
Rubio has been accused of making misleading statements about the NSA vote. Under the new system, the federal government can collect such data using other intelligence programs. Cruz claimed that while the old program covered “20 to 30 percent of phone numbers,” the new system “covers nearly 100 percent.”
Rubio, who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee, declined to speak about specifics, saying he didn’t think national television “is the place to discuss classified information.”
“I promise you the next time there is an attack on this country, the first thing people are going to ask is why didn’t we know about it,” Rubio added.

‘
Politico detailed “The 13 biggest moments of the GOP debate”. Here are the ones listed. Go to the link to read the details:

1. Trump rules out independent bid
2. Cruz and Rubio clash on surveillance
3. Cruz vs. Rubio on immigration
4. Democrats and horse thieves … and Trump and Cruz
5. Trump and Cruz, friends again
6. Christie vs. the senators
7. Carson touts surgery experience on foreign policy, and the crowd boos Hewitt
8. World War III breaks out … on stage
9. Rubio vs. Cruz on deposing Assad
10. ‘Disservice to humanity’
11. Jeb vs. Trump, continued
12. Jeb vs. Trump III, and the return of ‘low energy’
13. Read my lips

Political Wire:

Overall, this was a very good and generally substantive debate. The three main frontrunners — Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio — had solid exchanges on topics such as immigration and defeating the Islamic State.

It would be great to see a debate with just those three on stage. The debate solidified them as the three most likely to win the GOP nomination.

Cruz and Rubio are easily the best debaters and their exchanges were genuinely interesting. It’s fascinating to watch them as they try to appeal to different bases with their party. But both men argue like U.S. Senators and that’s not very attractive to GOP voters in an anti-establishment year. Chris Christie did a good job pointing this out.

Trump was Trump once again. Jeb Bush and Rand Paul both went after him hard but neither won a single exchange. It’s highly unlikely that Trump will ever win a majority of GOP voters, but he did a masterful job being the only candidate to speak to his base. With the exception of an angry outburst at Bush, it might have been Trump’s best debate yet.

Once again, Trump was the winner. Cruz took some hits on how he would combat the Islamic State, but he was very strong. Rubio fell short in defending himself on immigration in exchanges with Cruz. Trump has shown he can afford to be less precise on his own positions and that didn’t hurt him tonight.

Politico on CNN’s management of the debate:

About halfway through Tuesday night’s debate, Donald Trump played his now-familiar media card: He declared he was angry at CNN’s moderators for beginning so many questions with “Trump this, Trump that” and inciting candidates to attack him.
This time, though, the network’s questioner was ready. A relaxed, almost bemused Hugh Hewitt, the conservative radio host, quipped, “It’s not CNN. It’s me. It’s not CNN — America’s watching you.”

Even Trump seemed left without a retort.
With his silvery aplomb, Hewitt was able to accomplish something that has sometimes eluded some questioners brought into the other GOP debates — take the spotlight off the moderators and keep it on the candidates. It was a reflection of the overall command of the entire CNN team, which produced the smoothest and most informative debate of the raucous campaign season.
Chief moderator Wolf Blitzer remained fully in charge, at one point brushing off a braying Ted Cruz, seeking to inject himself into an exchange, with a cool, “These are the rules all of you agreed to.”
And when the situation called for tougher questioning, with aggressive follow-ups, there were Hewitt and CNN’s chief political correspondent Dana Bash. Each succeeded in drilling deep in their questioning without appearing argumentative.

The Atlantic:

The fifth Republican debate had the feel of a Chekhov play—a cast of characters together on the same stage, but each involved in their own, only occasionally interlocking, conflicts. Near the center, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz squared off in a series of detailed, wonky disputes about the military and surveillance. Meanwhile, a bit to the side and largely unawares, Jeb Bush and Donald Trump tried to one-up each other. Off to the right, John Kasich, Chris Christie, and Carly Fiorina vied to prove most willing to start a war. And nearly off in the wings, Rand Paul delivered a series of wry commentaries on the unfolding drama. (Ben Carson must have missed rehearsals; he had little to say.)

What unified the nine candidates on stage was their insistence that the Obama administration had failed to keep Americans safe, falling short in its efforts both stateside and abroad. It was a bleak, fearful debate. But the rivals’ offered disparate prescriptions for how to respond to this weakness, and were often vague. The main takeaways from the evening were that political correctness is bad and that most of the field, except perhaps Trump and Paul, are eager to deploy American troops to Syria and Iraq.

The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza listed the winners and losers (in his view) HERE.

Pajamas Media again offered legendary “drunk blogging” by Stephen Greene, aka Vodka Pundit. It needs to be read in FULL but here are some of his closing thoughts:

The bad: Too many candidates by half. There should have been five, top, on stage. Too long, by an hour. Probably a result of there being too many candidates, but also of CNN and the candidates wanting to milk these things for all they’re worth.

The good: This was a serious and substantive debate, well-hosted by Wolf Blitzer and by his co-moderators. More like this, please — but 60 minutes and four candidates shorter next time.

If you had a favorite candidate going in, they probably reinforced why they were your favorite. If there’s an exception to that, it might be Donald Trump who again exposed his ignorance on two basic-but-vital issues (internet intel and nuclear weapons) and showed no desire to fill in those gaps in his knowledge. He also threw a temper tantrum against the otherwise feckless Jeb Bush.

On the other hand, reading Trump supporters isn’t easy, so maybe they got more of what they wanted.

Next time edits need to be made. Kasich, Paul, Christie, and Fiorina need to be dropped from the main stage. Jeb gets a pass, but only because he has (for now) enough money and (barely) strong enough polls to get through NH and maybe SC, too.

As someone who doesn’t (and likely won’t) support a candidate other than the eventual nominee, tonight was a welcome change from the usual shouting matches. Or at least mostly so. In the end, viewers got a better feel for all the contenders, and CNN’s crew gets a lot of credit for that.

More like this, please — except for the parts we need less of.

Read his entries (they are legendary for a reason).
Daily Kos had quite a few entries. Here’s part of one:

What do killing family members of ISIS and bombing innocent children have in common? Popularity with the GOP debate audience.

It all started when the best question of the night came from Facebook: A student from Georgia Tech called Donald Trump on his suggestion that he would kill family members of ISIS in order to deter terrorists from attacking us. “So my question is: How does intentionally killing innocent civilians set us apart from ISIS?”

No surprise here, Trump doubled down: “I would be very very firm with families. And frankly, that will make people think. Because they may not care much about their lives, but they do care, believe it or not, about their family’s lives.”

And … you guessed it: the audience broke into applause.

Several minutes later, Ben Carson faced a question on whether he would be tough enough as Commander in Chief to order bombings that would kill innocent children.

“Could you do that? Could you order air strikes that would kill innocent children not just by scores, but the hundreds and the thousands?” Hugh Hewitt asked.

The conservative website Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey also did classic, content filled “live blogging.” Here’s the end of his long post:

7:49 – Rubio gives a good, comprehensive answer on modernizing the nuclear triad, offering a cogent explanation for those who may not know what that means.

7:50 – Trump retreats from his “maniac” comment about Cruz. When challenged why Cruz criticizes Trump in private but not in public, Cruz goes into a lengthy personal anecdote and then starts criticizing Obama and Hillary. Cruz then finishes by saying that everyone on stage has “infinitely better” judgment than the Democrats, but still won’t answer the specific question.

7:53 – Trump then says he’s “totally committed” to the Republican Party and won’t run as an independent.

7:59 – Closing statements. Finally.

8:02 – Bush stumbles through his closing statement, saying little other than his record is strong.

8:05 – Fiorina, Rubio, Carson, and Cruz all had good closing statements. I’d say that Christie, Rubio, and Cruz did themselves the most good. Not clear that anyone did themselves significant harm, but people like Bush, Paul, and Fiorina who needed breakout performances came up short. Watch New Hampshire to see whether this has any impact on the top tier; perhaps it might boost Christie there.

A CROSS SECTION OF TWEETS:

JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief

Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.

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