CHARLES PIERCE: The Republican Debate Finally Proved It's NOT Trump Who Has Lost His Mind

The Republican Debate Finally Proved It's Not Trump Who Has Lost His Mind
It's the rest of them.



Well, there it was, on a stage in South Carolina, the prion disease that has been afflicting the Republican party since Ronald Reagan first fed it the monkeybrains almost 40 years ago broke out into the general population. During the ninth debate of the Republican candidates for president, we saw actual facts booed (by my count) three times before the first commercial break. We saw two sons of Cuban emigres duke it out over who can make the lives of Hispanic immigrants more miserable. We saw a vulgar talking yam dare to tell the truth about C-Plus Augustus while standing next to his brother, and we later saw the vulgar talking yam call Ted Cruz the biggest liar he's ever seen. And still, after it was over, serious people got on the electric teevee machine to talk about who had the best night, and who won and who lost, and not one of them mentioned the obvious fact that one of our two major political parties suffered a complete mental meltdown on national television. The big winner was either Bernie Sanders or Hillary Rodham Clinton. The big loser was participatory democracy all the way back through history to Pericles. No wonder Ben Carson kept nodding off into the Western Isles. He was safer there.

Tell me truly—how does that spectacle not destroy the credibility of the Republican Party for at least a decade?

How does that freak show not blow up the party's claim to have serious policies to help govern the country? How does that carnival of unimaginative invective add up to a governing philosophy? How does that massive, chewy clusterfck add up to a single rational moment of human thought? I don't care if these guys believe in evolution or not, but they at least should try to demonstrate while they're on TV that, somehow, we've come a respectable distance as a species since we tottered out of Olduvai Gorge. I've seen better organized riots. I've heard more coherent dialogue from cats mating in an alley. I once heard a squirrel being eaten by a coyote. The squirrel had better manners while it was being devoured, and was better spoken besides. Christ above, somebody separate these clowns before they hurt their brains some more. Tailgunner Ted Cruz said more than he knows, not least because he doesn't know what "literally" means.


http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a42147/republican-debate-recap/