LAS VEGAS – As usual, your solitary reporter and his intrepid associate, Lewis Thompson, were at the Venetian Hotel here in Sin City to report on yesterday’s GOP presidential debate, which was actually not a debate so much as an exercise in cacophony, as Sen. Ted Cruz (TP-Texas) tried unsuccessfully to shout down moderator Wolf Blitzer and panel members Dana Bash and Hugh Hewitt, while Carly Fiorina interrupted the proceedings to remind everybody that she has no experience in government service..
Because New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie told everyone that his eyes glazed over while Cruz and his chief rival, Sen. Marco Rubio (TP-Florida), pressed each other on the minutiae of metadata collection by the NSA and on immigration policy, here is what you need to know about the debate:
John Kasich said that he is from Ohio, and that no Republican has ever been elected president without winning Ohio, so Republicans should vote for him.
Rand Paul said that he doesn’t like what’s happening in the Middle East. Paul also reminded the audience that his father, Ron Paul, should have been elected president on the Libertarian Party ticket in 1988, and also that his father should have been elected president in 2008 and 2012 as some version of a Republican.
Carly Fiorina, a sometime Californian who ran for the Senate in 2010 but lost hugely to Barbara Boxer, said that she has been to China, but she did not say whether she had ever been to San Bernardino. She also rattled on endlessly, bragging about how many generals she knows.
Ben Carson said that when he visited Syrian refugees in Jordan, he told them that they should go to northeastern Syria, since they do not want to come to the United States.
Christie, desperately trying to be the biggest, baddest fearmonger on the stage, said that he was a federal attorney in New Jersey before becoming governor of The Garden State, where he specialized in closing access to the George Washington Bridge so people could not drive their cars to Wall Street.
Jeb received the loudest applause of the evening, and improved his cred, when he told Donald Trump that he cannot win the Republican nomination or the presidency by insulting people.
Trump said that he is a Republican (something that the RNC has never been sure of), and that he won’t run as a third-party candidate once he is rejected by the voters in the early primary states. This astonished reporter Chris Cuomo and everyone else watching the post-game show.
At times, “carpet bombing” of ISIS was mentioned so often by the fearmongering GOP wannabes that the solitary reporter and Thompson wondered whether some of the candidates had been rug salesmen.
In the spin room after the debate, Trump told Thompson that he will name Carson as his Surgeon General, and that he will appoint his wife, Melania, as his Secretary of Commerce because she has been successful in selling her jewelry. Trump was silent on Melania’s history of posing nude in her native Slovenia before she met The Donald.
Write a comment