Daily Clips: January 15th, 2016
Last night, I was planning on putting down my thoughts on the GOP Debate in South Carolina, but I couldn’t do it. I was simply too exhausted from the whole spectacle. This debate wasn’t even particularly egregious in any sense. Yet after six months of this shit, we all know what’s going on: these people are deranged, fear-mongering, angry, apocalyptic puppets of corporate greed that are following the beck and call of disenfranchised, racist white people.
I remember watching the 2012 GOP primary and thinking, “It can’t get any worse than this.” I was so wrong.
As Goldy wrote to the team this morning, “Was it just me, or was that the worst debate so far? Vile, repulsive, and almost totally lacking in substance. That one of these clowns will ultimately get over 40 percent of the popular vote is a national embarrassment.”
Best tweets from the debate:
before and after watching the #gopdebate pic.twitter.com/1gKKVpm9Tt
— sean (@SeanMcElwee) January 15, 2016
2 sons of immigrants fight over who will exclude more immigrants #GOPDebate pic.twitter.com/GSEa25WEgS
— sfpelosi (@sfpelosi) January 15, 2016
Trump’s rivals help him hijack the GOP: Dana Milbank also found last night’s debate to be a terrible showing for the Republican party.
Republicans like to blame Trump for hijacking the party, but equally to blame are the others in the race for letting it happen — and continuing to do so, now just two weeks from the Iowa caucuses. Thursday night’s debate was another depressing development: Any of four men on the stage — Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie or John Kasich — could have been a viable alternative to the fear and demagoguery offered by Trump and Ted Cruz. Instead, they cluttered the stage and quarreled among themselves, offering little beyond faint echoes of Trump’s rage.
and Milbank’s analysis here is spot on:
The GOP race is typically described as a struggle between the outsiders and the establishment. Really it’s a battle between the demagogic (Cruz and Trump) and the selfish (Rubio, Bush, Christie, Kasich). The latter candidates, blinded by certainty in their own magnificence, refuse to clear the field so that one of them can take on the demagogues. (Ben Carson, the other man on the stage, appeared to have wandered, bewildered, into the debate.)
