Summary
And that’s that for the morning after the night before. The campaign continues, of course, but we’re closing our blog for now. So, what have we learned? Bullet points:
- Republicans really are not going to play ball with President Obama over his nomination of a supreme court justice to replace Antonin Scalia, who died on Saturday at the age of 79. Such a nomination would, if successful, tip the scales on the court in favour of liberal opinion.
- This Republican obstruction may include more Senate-stymying filibustering from Texas senator Ted Cruz, although if the Senate Republicans just refuse to do a single thing about Obama’s nominee, as Florida senator Marco Rubio today said they will, Cruz won’t need to brush up on his Green Eggs and Ham.
- Senate Democrats, including the two members from the great state of Vermont, Bernie Sanders and Patrick Leahy, say this is politicising the issue and something Senate Democrats would never do. Republicans dispute this.
- No-one really tackled the key question: if presidents are not allowed to do things in their final year in the White House, as the Republicans seem to be suggesting, why are presidential terms four years long and not three?
- And if they were three years long, would that mean presidents could only act in two years?
- And so on, reductio ad absurdum?
- Also, no-one knew if Anthony Kennedy’s 1988 appointment, in the final year of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, was relevant here or not. Republicans said not.
- Also, no-one knows if the Thurmond Rule exists or not.
- Other than that, all questions about whether Saturday night’s Republican debate had descended too far into a pointless maelstrom of petty and personal abuse and abstract shouting about Obama … were not answered, in favour of further petty and personal abuse and abstract shouting about Obama.
- To that end: Donald Trump still thinks attacking Jeb Bush – poor, trailing Jeb – on Iraq and 9/11 – pays off pollswise.
- Rubio and Cruz can bicker in Spanish.
- The Democratic race wasn’t really the issue today.
And finally, vitally:
- Has anyone seen Ben Carson?
As we roll towards a merciful close, something not from a talk show. Sort of.
A new CBS/YouGov poll in South Carolina gives Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton solid leads in the state, less than a week before the vote on 20 February:
Note the appearance of Ben Carson (5%, Republican) and Hillary Clinton (59%, Democratic), two shrinking violets who did not appear all over the shows this morning. Possibly for different reasons.
Note also David Smith’s splendid piece from South Carolina, in which he spoke to many voters about Clinton and Sanders and their chances in the primary…
Updated
And here's what Bernie Sanders said on CBS…
Ed Helmore was watching…
It is “beyond comprehension” that Republicans are threatening to deny President Obama his right to nominate and confirm a supreme court justice to replace Scalia, the Vermont senator said.
“It illustrates the level of Republican obstructionism against Obama from day one. This is not something in debate. The constitution provides for a president to nominate a supreme court justice and the Senate hold hearings to approve that nomination. The idea that Republicans want to deny the president his basic constitutional right is beyond my comprehension.”
Sanders vowed to do everything he could to make the legislative body go through with speeding confirmation hearings. Asked what leverage Democrats have if the Republican majority in Congress decides to “slow-walk” the process, Sanders said the main leverage Democrats have is in “rallying the American people.”
“The issue must be taken to the people,” he said. “Fair-minded Americans, no matter what their political point of view, will say this is absurd, this is obstructionism and not what democracy, or Congress, is supposed to be about.”
What Bernie Sanders said about the Scalia successor on ABC earlier!
“President Obama, in my view, should make that nomination. I hope he does it as soon as possible and I hope that the Senate confirms and begins deliberations as soon as possible.”
Nice use of the “hopey changey stuff”, there. Evokes nostalgia for 2008, as well as a sort of cold, mirthless laughter.
Furthermore: “I don’t think that Mitch McConnell has it right on this issue. The constitution is pretty clear and that it is the job of the president of the United States to appoint [and] nominate members to the supreme court and the Senate confirms. When there is a vacancy, the president makes a nomination and the Senate deliberates and then votes up or down. I hope that happens.”
And on Scalia? “He was clearly a brilliant man, very outspoken, very forceful.”
Updated
The shows are now approaching their end – a sad weekly moment signalled by NBC cutting to the panel, a revolving bunch of journalists and “strategists” who wear the haunted look both of people who know there’s nine months of this to go, and people who know Joel Osteen has bought up the next hour of programming.
Still hunting down those darned Democrats.
Still looking for Democrats. In the meantime, many people on The Internet have noticed that Jeb Bush has taken his glasses off.
I don't think that #JebBush should ever take his glasses off.
— Stephanie Grue (@stephaniegrue) February 14, 2016
However:
#TBT Jeb Bush on eyewear: ‘I’m not going to take off my stinking glasses’ https://t.co/edog4MK2dy
— Igor Bobic (@igorbobic) February 11, 2016
Does this in fact Mean Something? I think we should be told.
Edward Helmore is now watching Face the Nation, debate host CBS’s Sunday show. I’m surprised the show is running, given the battering the anchors took from the candidates/children in front of them last night, which left John Dickerson with blue smoke coming out of his ears. But still.
Also, there are no Democrats in sight yet. Ed, he say:
Responding to accusations that last night’s debate had been reduced into un-presidential slug-fest, Donald Trump told CBS that since he went to an Ivy League university, he ‘could be so politically correct you’d be bored to tears’.
Instead, he repeated his accusations that President George W Bush had failed to protect America when the Twin Towers were destroyed during his presidential “reign”.
“We weren’t safe,” he said. “The World Trade Center came down and the CIA had said something was going to happen.”
Trump did try to back-track on earlier accusations that the former president had lied on the issue of WMD in Iraq. “If he knew there were no weapons, “that would be a lie. So maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t.”
Either way, Trump added, “we went to war when there when there were no weapons of mass destruction. He thought there were and there weren’t. He shouldn’t have started it. He should have gone to the beach and not done anything. Saddam was not a good person but he made a living killing terrorists.”
The Iraq expedition, Trump concluded, “was a disaster that started a chain over events that could now lead to the destruction of Europe”.
Todd now asks Rubio about his remark onstage last night, that 9/11 was basically Bill Clinton’s fault because he didn’t kill Osama bin Laden. He repeats the charge that chances – four of them, according to the 9/11 report – to take out al-Qaida leadership were not taken.
“It is doubtful 9/11 would have taken place at least on 11 September 2001”, he says, if this had happened. Huh.
Todd isn’t clear. Are you putting 9/11 on Bill Clinton?
“No, I’m putting it on his decision not to take out the al-Qaida leader, absolutely.”
Well that makes all the difference.
Meet the Press now goes on to recorded chats with Rubio and Kasich, about the same things: the supreme court, the beastliness of last night’s debate.
Todd goes again on shouldn’t Republicans in the Senate at least go through the motions on a nomination. Rubio says, flatly, that they just won’t “while this president is in the White House”. Shouldn’t someone ask if they would do this if that president were Republican?
“We’re going to have an election, we’re going to have a new position, I believe it’s gonna be me and we’re going to look for someone like Scalia.”
So that’s that.
I can’t find any Democrats. On NBC, we have pre-recorded Cruz. A case of 4,057 Channels (and Nothin’ On but Republicans, Frothing).
Cruz denies that each term of a presidency is only three years long, with the final year a year in which nominations and other business are not allowed. Unfortunately Chuck Todd goes on too long in his question and gets on to the mechanics of a 4-4 court, letting Cruz off a hook of his own making.
Shouldn’t the Senate at least go through the process?
“The Senate’s duty is to advise and consent,” says Cruz, “and we’re advising the president now.”
Then he mentions Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, but only really as a means to attack Donald Trump for supporting liberals. And he’s back to the second amendment being written out of the constitution if Trump gets in, which of course it absolutely wouldn’t be.
Updated
Donald Trump is on NBC now – to camera, not on the phone. I’m looking for Democrats, really I am.
Who would he appoint?
“We need great intellect.”
Well, yeah.
“Somebody like Justice Scalia.”
Well, quite.
And we’re back to the 2008 “impeach Bush” remark – maybe Trump has a box of buttons like Alvy in Annie Hall: “impeach Bush, impeach Reagan, impeach McCain, impeach any part of humanity that gets in the way”.
More hammering of Jeb on Iraq. As Nicky Woolf observed yesterday, this must poll well. And more on 9/11 and whether George W Bush kept America safe:
“No … I wish he did … I have nothing against George Bush … how did he keep us safe when the World Trade Center came down … that was the worst tragedy in our history.”
Could Bush have prevented it?
“Yes, the answer is he should have known.” Trump blames “the agencies” that were fighting each other.
Look, I wrote about Osama bin Laden in 2000 in a book.
Chuck Todd tells Trump this is a risky strategy, attacking George W Bush on 9/11 and Iraq and WMD.
“I didn’t call anyone a lier,” says Trump. “I said maybe there were lies.”
Will this cost Trump South Carolina? Trump says the Republican party is rejecting the war in Iraq and is with him, despite his attack on a popular ex-president. He still thinks he’ll win.
“It was like a demolition derby but the good news is that my car’s still going round the circuit.”
So sayeth Kasich, bringer of civility and aw-shucks expressions of wonder at the viciousness of the Republican race.
“By the way, I think these debates are ridiculous. This is not a way to pick a president. You want to pick a president, come to a town hall.”
He did more than 100 of those in New Hampshire, where he came in second, invigorating his campaign – although his South Carolina numbers ain’t, by any stretch of the imagination, great.
Kasich says he is familiar with the process of nominating a supreme court justice, or at least justices to the supreme court in his state, Ohio. “It’s pretty interesting,” he says.
Stephanopoulos agrees.
Kasich has that effect: he’s agreeable, people agree with him, and now he says he understands the president’s intent to nominate. He would do the same. But he wants “broad consensus across the country” to “start the healing process”.
My colleague Jeb Lund doesn’t buy Kasich’s presentation, though:
John Kasich’s performative appeals to political civility [are] all about maintaining a brand.
So sayeth the Guardian’s Jeb – the one, true Jeb – here.
Rubio is speaking on ABC now – the magic of television! – and he says he too would filibuster any Obama nomination, but won’t need to because Mitch McConnell won’t let any nomination happen.
He also dodges the question when asked – twice, incisive anchor fans – if he will support Trump if he is the nominee. The nominee is going to be him, you see.
Kasich next.
Rubio speaks on Fox News Sunday
This from the aforementioned Ed Helmore…
Marco Rubio warned that Senate legislators would not move forward to confirm any nominee President Obama puts forward, arguing that there needs to be a debate [-not another one of the damned things, surely – ed] and the decision over Scalia’s replacement should be part of voters’ calculus in November.
“The president can nominate any candidate he likes, and we can debate, but the Senate will not move forward on it. Period,” he said. \
In the event that he is elected president, Rubio said he would appoint a nominee “in the mold of Scalia – one of the great jurists in history.”
Presented with the argument that President Reagan nominated a new supreme court justice in the waning months of his administration, Rubio said it did “not matter” what Reagan did.
“That as in 1987. Obama has 10-11 months left in office. There’s going to be a debate on
what a new justice should be and voters are going to weigh in.”
The president, he said, “should allow the next president to appoint a justice”.
Trump calls in
Trump is on the phone and he is bashing Cruz’s smashes right back: Cruz has no friends, he committed electoral fraud in Iowa with the Carson thing: “This is not a man who should be president.”
Does he still believe George W Bush should be impeached over Iraq, as he said in 2008 and which came up rather explosively in the debate?
“I didn’t endorse anything,” says Trump, before repeating his Iraq attack lines against Jeb Bush from last night. “And by the way, Obama got us out of there the wrong way.”
“Even though I’m the most militaristic person there is, I said don’t do this war. That’s why we have the migration and all the other problems we have right now.”
Stephanopoulos returns to the impeachment remark – see, he’s insistent – which is on tape from CNN. “I don’t even think about it,” says Trump, before thinking about it and discussing it. But he doesn’t repeat it, and goes on to his thing about loving the veterans and wanting to “bomb the oil”. Which would be messy if nothing else.
About Scalia and Trump’s support for his sister: “I said it jokingly… it’s obviously a conflict. My sister happens to have a little bit different views from me.”
He likes Diane Sykes from Wisconsin. He doesn’t like Justice John Roberts, who “twice could have ended Obamacare and didn’t do it”. We have Obamacare because of Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush, he says.
And he is the only Republican who can beat Hillary, and he expects success in South Carolina because he is self-funding and not in the pocket of donors.
What I said about Beckett plays. The same lines, again and again, from a ragtag bunch of scarecrows in a post-apocalyptic landscape. One of them may soon end up in a bin, like Woody Allen’s best mate Tony Roberts when I saw Endgame off Broadway an aeon ago.
Updated
Ted Cruz will 'absolutely' filibuster any Obama nomination
We have a replay of the fieriest bits of Saturday night’s debate, including Trump-Bush on 9/11 and Iraq and Rubio and Cruz on who speaks Spanish or not. It’s entertaining, in a loathsome sort of a way.
But here’s Cruz!
Anthony Kennedy was confirmed in February 1988, late in Reagan’s last term, Stephanopoulos points out. Cruz plays his shots:
“It was the Democrats who dragged it out for many months to make it that late,” he says, mentioning previous defeated nominations including that of Robert Bork.
He adds: “This next election needs to be a referendum on the court, the people need to decide … we should not a lame duck president capture the court.”
Does this mean Cruz will filibuster any appointment?
“Absolutely.”
Yikes. We’ve been here before. Brush up on your misunderstood readings of Doctor Seuss.
“Democrats understand the stakes,” Cruz says, saying lefties push for lefty justices but Republicans do not push for righties – and they should. He then tells the voters of South Carolina that their second-amendment gun rights are at threat from a liberal nominee, or from a president whether “it’s Hillary, Bernie or Donald Trump”. The last-named is not a proper conservative, he says… again.
And we’re off into some sustained Trump bashing – Trump said his sister could be a good supreme court choice and his sister was appointed as a judge by Bill Clinton. So. Cruz also points out Trump’s support, partial, for Planned Parenthood, which he expressed rather remarkably on stage last night.
Is Cruz concerned about Trump’s polling lead? He ignores the question to trumpet his record.
“Justice Scalia’s passing changes the contours of this race,” he says. “The time for the circus and the reality show is gone.”
Doesn’t seem to be, Ted.
He smashes some more overheads towards Trump.
Updated
It’s ABC This Week time!
… and the comparatively-insistent-and-incisive-when-it-comes-to-questioning-the-pols George Stephanopoulos is our host. Kasich, Rubio and Sanders are up.
The ABC intro is great: a bit WWF, a bit Day Today, a bit Barnum & Bailey with bombastic announcer, whooshing graphics and all. Anyway.
They play the debate clip of Trump reciting every 1990s Washington politician’s favourite Dylan song: “Delay, Delay, Delay.” Such jokes become inevitable when one is waiting, anxiously, for Marco Rubio to start shouting about socialism.
Justice Scalia’s biography is called American Original. I still want to write an American version of George and Weedon Grossmith’s brilliant Diary of a Nobody. It will be called American American.
Interesting question arising today already: will intransigence leading to an eight-justice supreme court for a year or more cost the Republicans with the American public? Will they lose the Senate that way? Does the public hate this kind of thing as much as liberal beardy British journos do?
They might lose the Senate anyway, of course, given the biannual merrygoround of seats up for grabs in November. They might also lose the next presidential election.
This and more scintillating analysis distilled, just for you, over the next two hours or so. I do love the Sunday talk shows. Really.
It’s time for speculation about potential nominees. On CNN, former Obama White House adviser David Axelrod mentions Kamala Harris, the attorney general of California, but doesn’t seem to think that’s going to happen. We also have some chat about Sri Srinivasan and Jane Kelly, both sitting, serving federal judges confirmed 97-0 by the Senate.
Axelrod points out that won’t matter, because Republicans now, in the current circumstances, will not approve anyone who is suggested by Obama. QED.
Updated
NBC is trailing its chat with Ted Cruz, in which he says:
We’re advising that a lame-duck president in an election year is not going to be able to tip the balance of the supreme court.
We knew that. For some further reading, Cruz is a bit of an originalist when it comes to the US constitution, and praised Scalia for being one too. Here’s what Ben Jacobs found out about that the other month, when Donald Trump was saying Cruz was not qualified, by his Canadian birth, to be president:
The conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt says Patrick Leahy may have been being economical with the actualité just now when he talked about voting through nominations from Republican presidents.
Well… it’s not unlikely a politician of any stripe would do that, is it?
Now we have Patrick Leahy, the senator from Vermont who is the ranking Democrat on the Senate judicial committee. He’s asked about Mitch McConnell’s stance against any consideration, even, of a nominee to succeed Justice Scalia. His response is, predictably, forthright – and it invokes a Republican holy cow:
I think he’s making a terrible mistake, certainly ignoring the constitution and their responsibility. President Obama is doing what President Reagan did at the end of his term. He nominated a supreme court justice, the nomination was at the end of his term, Democrats controlled the Senate and none of us intended to play politics with something as important as a supreme court nomination. The Democrats voted 97-0 in favour of President Reagan’s nominee.
He’s got more about what he calls “the sheer dereliction of duty for the Senate not to schedule a hearing, not even to have a vote”.
He’s asked about the Thurmond rule, by which a controlling party can let things drift at the end of a president’s time in office.
“There is no such thing as the Thurmond rule,” Leahy says, sending a million journalists scrambling for their explainers of what happens next, with brimming bottles of Tippex.
In the last two years of President George W Bush’s term Democrats controlled the Senate, Leahy says, and theyconfirmed Bush’s judges. “[The Republicans] are playing politics,” he says, “the same way they did when they killed President Clinton’s judges with the pocket veto.”
Leahy then denies he is playing politics, or ever would: “I was there when the Democrats were in charge in last year of Reagan’s term and I urged that we go forward and we did. I’m pretty clear where I am.”
He also says Justice Scalia was a friend. Their youngest sons played soccer in grade school on Sunday mornings, he says, and adds: “This is a terrible blow to his family, let’s not add to the blow by politicising this.
“If the Republicans refuse to even hold a hearing I think that will cost them control of the Senate.”
Updated
Jeb! speaks
“The debate stage was sizzling hot and the insults got personal,” says Bash, as CNN cut to a montage of debate insults like the one what we have here:
Now we have Jeb Bush. Where does he stand on Scalia and replacing him: “In all likelihood Obama’s nominee will be outside the mainstream and will be rejected by the Senate.”
Bush says Obama does have the power to nominate a new justice; he dodges a question about whether he thinks the Senate should at least schedule a vote, which they look like refusing to do. We’re on to previous appointments by Bush’s dad, HW – Souter and Roberts. Bush defends, of course.
Scalia was very consistent, says Bush. Well, yes.
On to the debate. “I don’t know him well enough to not like him,” Bush says about Trump and his insults last night in Greenville. “When he talks about foreign policy, it’s scary.”
Bush still says Trump is not a proper nominee. He has said he’d support him against Hillary Clinton, though.
And why is George W Bush now campaigning to help his brother? Why now?
“He hasn’t done anything public since he left office so this is the right time,” says Bush.
Does he regret waiting this long, given his brother’s continued popularity compared to his plummeting poll numbers?
“Three or four obituaries have been written but I’m still alive,” says Bush. “He’ll help my campaign a lot.”
“Yes I’m a Bush, I’m proud of my dad and my brother and my mom.”
Jeb then says his aim for South Carolina is more than just to finish third and survive: “My hope is to be there as others drop out, to challenge the frontrunning candidate … my expectation is that I’ll beat expectations here.”
No glasses for Jeb! this morning, by the way. I think they suit him.
Updated
Now Rubio is asked if he is questioning Ted Cruz’s status as a Latino, when he questions the Texas senator’s ability to speak Spanish, as he did last night in the debate. He denies it and instead hammers Cruz – as he did in the debate last night, you know blogging this really is a bit like watching a Beckett play – for lying, being a sneak in elections, for flip-flopping on immigration. Plus ça, or whatever that is in Spanish.
Rubio doubles down on calling Cruz a lier, outright: “He is saying things repeatedly that are not true and he knows they are not true.”
Cruz has also been telling naughty fibs about Rubio’s stance on same-sex marriage and the supreme court, it seems. Or so Rubio says.
And what about Chris Christie. “We’ve tried to get a hold of him,” says Rubio, of the man who eviscerated him in New Hampshire and then dropped out of the race. Rubio says he likes Christie, really, honest.
It’s Rubio first.
As senator, do you have a responsibility to consider a nominee to replace Scalia?
No. Rubio goes back to his ground from last night, which is that no lame duck president has named a supreme court justice in his last year in office in 80 years, and that thus no, the Senate will not move.
“The court doesn’t meet all year, they have a term and it ends this summer,” Rubio says. He’s happy for an eight-member court and backs Mitch McConnell on the Senate doing nothing.
What about Sri Srinivasan, whose name has come up as a possible Obama nominee?
What about him, Rubio says, essentially. “When I’m president of the United States I’m going to look for someone like justice Scalia. And they’re hard to find.”
No Republican seems to think the next president who does the appointing may be a Democrat. Odd, that.
The talk begins…
We’re on CNN first, where State of the Union anchor Dana Bash says: “Welcome to Washington, where the state of the union is steeling for a fight.” I’m not sure that makes much sense. Who with? NBC’s Meet the Press? What with? Autocues at five paces?
Our Washington bureau chief, Dan Roberts, asks: Can anyone stop Donald Trump?
The battle to stop Donald Trump from winning the Republican presidential nomination is sometimes compared, vividly, to a bucket of crabs.
After last night, I’m not sure I can improve on that.
And also and also … here’s Frankie. There’s a guy striding down a corridor purposefully in here, wearing a blazer and a shirt but no tie. There is no doubt that this Means Something.
…and also, here’s more Jeb Lund on the smorgasbord of insult, rage and incoherence that was the Republican debate:
… this debate veered fully into absurdity somewhere around the third time that Donald Trump told the actual truth about things that actually happened in actual history and was booed by the audience for his trouble.
After stating that the Bush administration lied to the American people in order to drum up support for the war in Iraq, failed to keep us safe on 9/11 and passed up opportunities to assassinate bin Laden before the 9/11 attacks, the sheer mutual antagonism between the candidates and a furious audience caused something between Trump and Bush to come thoroughly unglued. Then, they simply began arguing like two people with mutual antipathy towards one another rather than politicians.
From there, the madness spread through the debate: a great circle of abuse spun around fast enough to fling all sense away. Rubio hates Cruz who hates Trump who hates Bush who hates Trump who hates Cruz who hates Rubio.
While we wait for the shows … be still our beating hearts, quiet our throbbing temples, play a little light jazz, our aching brains … here’s a sampling of the Guardian’s opinion writers’ thoughts on Scalia, his passing and What It All Means:
It may well be a year – or several – before the Senate confirm anybody to replace Scalia, who died on Saturday at the age of 79. But that vote will almost assuredly not be unanimous, regardless of who the eventual nominee is: the politics of US supreme court appointments have become as polarized as the rest of American politics.
And Scalia himself played a significant role in that very polarization.
US supreme court justice Antonin Scalia was not simply a paragon of American jurisprudence: he was an incredible legal scholar, a devout Catholic (his appointment marked the first time that two Catholics served concurrently on the US supreme court), a conservative stalwart, a great teacher and a dedicated family man.
His loss will not only be felt by the people whose lives he impacted through judicial proceedings, but by those he met and those he taught. For many of us, his loss is staggering and personal.
Good morning, and welcome to our continuing live coverage of the 2016 presidential campaign, on the morning after the night when House of Cards came to life.
Late on Saturday afternoon, news broke that the supreme court justice Antonin Scalia had died at a ranch in Texas, at the age of 79. Tributes were paid from right (“defender of the constitution and the rule of law, patriot, conservative”) and left (“although I did not agree with the justice on many things, he was a great man and a great lawyer and, surprisingly, a good friend of Ruth Bader Ginsburg…”)
The news world scrambled.
And then, even as the stars and stripes was being lowered to half-staff at the supreme court, Republican senators and Republican senators’ staffers started to say it: there is no way the Republican-controlled Senate will let President Obama even nominate a new justice, never mind confirm one, not when the court is now 4-4 liberal-conservative split and the end of Obama’s term in the White House is 11 months away.
And then, Obama, speaking from California – you could tell he was there because he was wearing a blazer and shirt but no tie – paid tribute to Scalia … and said he would indeed nominate a replacement.
And then the Republican debate started in South Carolina, and after a brief pause to remember Scalia and say in different ways that Obama shouldn’t even think about nominating a replacement… unless he would just be bipartisan for once and nominate a “consensus candidate”… the ordure hit the air conditioning.
Donald Trump went – with a vengeance spluttered through paroxysm after paroxysm of red-faced fury – after Jeb Bush. He went to 9/11 and Iraq, again – and, family honour at stake, Jeb jabbed back.
Marco Rubio, a little less robotic this time, went after Ted Cruz. Cruz tried to speak Spanish. John Kasich didn’t actually say “Jiminy Jillickers, guys!” but he did say “Jeez, oh man” as he contemplated the bile, vitriol and viscera flying about the stage. And, at points, Ben Carson – remember him – seemed to wake up and realise that he is, somehow, still in the race. He said something about the constitution. His new book is about it, remember.
It was quite a spectacle – in the way that a gang of three year olds squabbling over an Elsa dress at a playgroup Valentine’s Day party is a spectacle. It was bearable for about the same amount of time.
Jeb Lund, comment maestro de nos newspaper office, he say:
What the hell happened on Saturday night?
The umpteenth (or penultiumpteenth) Republican Debate was an ecstasy of noise in which everything was indistinguishable. We are long past you-can’t-do-that-on-television. We are long past manufactured controversy. We are fully into clown slapfight.
Meanwhile, Frank Luntz, Republican pollster of pollsters, he may have a point when he say:
Seriously, this is insane.
— Frank Luntz (@FrankLuntz) February 14, 2016
The GOP is destroying itself tonight, and they have no one to blame but themselves. #GOPDebate
…and after all that, this Valentine’s morning, the candidates (and Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, remember them) will take to the talk shows and it will all begin again.
Enter Francis Underwood, stage left, smirking in sinister fashion.
Stick with us as we stick with it. Hopefully.
Updated
