gracchusdixit

The first Republican Presidential primary debate is now behind us—thank God—and it was, as almost everyone predicted, dominated by the larger-than-life specter of Donald Trump.  Trump himself got more “face time” on the stage than any other candidate, in part because the moderators appointed by Fox News Channel, fairly or unfairly, focused much of their energy on grilling him.  How he held up under their fire depends on who you talk, or listen, to.

It wasn’t Trump, however, who got the biggest round of applause from the Republican faithful sitting in the audience.  That honor went to Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, when he quipped:

Well, first, let me say I think God has blessed us.  He has blessed the Republican Party with some very good candidates.  The Democrats can’t even find one.

Nothing so reliably brings Republicans to their feet than a shot over the bow—or under the belt—at the likely Democratic nominee, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

The more consequential fact is that so many people on both sides of the political divide agree with at least part of Rubio’s remark, i.e., the proposition that the Republican Party does indeed have “some very good candidates”.  Even Rachel Maddow, the most-watched personality on left-leaning MSNBC, has often said as much, referring to the “serious” contenders who populate the Republican field.

That, of course, depends on what you mean by “serious”.  If the sole criterion is a resumé, then I suppose people like Rubio and Maddow have a point.  There were three sitting Senators on the stage in Cleveland and five current or former governors.  Even the “happy hour” debate that came earlier in the day was populated by six current or former public officials and the one-time CEO of what used to be America’s leading technology company—though to be fair, it must be noted that Hewlitt-Packard fell from that perch on Carly Fiorina’s watch.

If, on the other hand, “serious” means “serious ideas,” then the Republican Party, rather than blessed, is cursed.

Reading the transcript of the debate—which I have done and would recommend to no one who has anything even remotely better to do—is a bewildering and depressing experience.  It is nearly impossible to find in that dismal text one convincing idea.  Indeed, it is all but impossible to find a coherent English sentence coming from anyone other than Fox News Channel’s moderators, Brett Baier, Megyn Kelly, and Chris Wallace.  Whatever you may think of their views, they at least have the ability to string two words together.  The same cannot be said of the candidates who spent several hours struggling to answer their questions.

In recounting the nonsense that came out of their mouths, it is hard to know where to begin.  On the subject of immigration, for example, which animates the rabid Republican base like no other issue, the idiocies and inaccuracies were pervasive.  The aforementioned Rubio was the most vapid:

This is the most generous country in the world when it comes to immigration.  There are a million people a year who legally immigrate to the United States, and people feel like we’re being taken advantage of.  We feel like, despite our generosity, we’re being taken advantage of.

While it is true that a “million people a year” legally immigrate to the United States, we also happen to be a country with a population of more than three hundred million.  Compared with other, much smaller countries, the number of immigrants we admit is anything but “generous”.  On a percentage basis, tiny Luxembourg, with a population less than half the size of The Bronx, welcomes six times as many.

To give him his due, Jeb Bush tried to be more rational:

I believe that the great majority of people coming here illegally have no other option.  They want to provide for their family. 

Bush’s subsequent comments, alas, descended into incoherent and inconsistent nonsense, as he tried to reconcile simple compassion with the senseless animus of the Republican electorate.

They became worse than incoherent—they became downright dishonest—when he turned to the mess in the Middle East:

Barack Obama became President, and he abandoned Iraq.  He left, and when he left, Al Qaida was done for.  ISIS was created because of the void that we left, and that void that we left now exists as a caliphate the size of Indiana.

The last time I looked, it was Jeb’s brother, “Dubya,” whose lies got us into the mess in Iraq in the first place and Barack Obama who finally caught up with Osama Bin Laden and began trying, however fitfully, to get us out.  Jeb and the neo-cons who surround him can try to rewrite history all they want, but that won’t change the facts.

More ridiculous still were the comments of Mike Huckabee and Scott Walker regarding abortion rights.  From Huckabee came these lofty pronouncements:

I think the next president ought to invoke the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution now that we clearly know that that baby inside the mother’s womb is a person at the moment of conception. The reason we know that it is because of the DNA schedule that we now have clear scientific evidence on.

I suppose it’s possible that the former governor of Arkansas has never actually read the Constitution.  If he did, he would find that the two Amendments he cites apply solely to persons who qualify as “citizens” of the United States either by birth or naturalization.  Like it or not, you can’t be a citizen if you haven’t been born.  No “DNA schedule” in the world can change this inconvenient reality, because there is no such thing as a “DNA schedule,” which is a fiction of Mike Huckabee’s own devising.

Scott Walker, for his part, didn’t even bother with Constitutional niceties or make-believe science:

Well, I’m pro-life, I’ve always been pro-life, and I’ve got a position that I think is consistent with many Americans out there in that I believe that that is an unborn child that’s in need of protection out there, and I’ve said many a time that that unborn child can be protected, and there are many other alternatives that can also protect the life of that mother. That’s been consistently proven.

The only thing that’s been “consistently proven” is that Walker seems to care solely about protecting an “an unborn child” regardless of any risks to the life of its mother.  The “other alternatives” he refers to simply don’t exist.

Looniest of all was Ben Carson, who doesn’t even have a political resumé to fall back on.  When it came to the question of reforming our Byzantine tax code, designed to favor the wealthy at every turn, he invoked his own version of Biblical writ:

What I agree with is that we need a significantly changed taxation system.  And the one I’ve advocated is based on tithing, because I think God is a pretty fair guy.  And he said, you know, if you give me a tithe, it doesn’t matter how much you make.  If you’ve had a bumper crop, you don’t owe me triple tithes.  And if you’ve had no crops at all, you don’t owe me no tithes.  So there must be something inherently fair in that.

It may well be that “God is a pretty fair guy,” but as much as I’ve tried, I’m afraid that I’ve been unable to find the phrase, “bumper crop,” in the Old or New Testaments.  On the other hand, since Carson, like Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz, seems to speak with the Almighty on a regular basis, he may know something that less favored mortals do not.

I could go on, of course.  But you get the point.  While there may have been ten candidates on the stage in Cleveland this week, there wasn’t a “serious” person, with a “serious” idea, among them.  If one of these buffoons is “blessed” enough to get elected, it will be a curse for the rest of us.