Republican debate: just come home

The Republican presidential candidates debated this morning on ABC, which hasn’t bothered to create a transcript and whose website makes you watch a commercial before every excerpt, which limited the number of excerpts I felt like watching.

Romney said he gets “tired of people that are holier than thou because they’ve been pro-life longer than I have.” Then it’s just as well he’s not trying to get the nomination of a party dominated by holier-than-thou types. Oh wait. McCain said that abortion “has a lot to do with national security... it says very much what kind of a country we are, and our respect for human life.”

Romney said that of course we’ll would send troops into Pakistan unilaterally whenever we feel like it, but Obama shouldn’t have said that out loud, in front of the children. McCain said that we might invade Pakistan but that since such an invasion might result in the overthrow of Generalissimo Musharaf and the establishment of a radical government there we should just not talk about it and hope they don’t notice we’re invading them, like the Cambodians never heard about the “secret bombing” of Cambodia until years later, when they could, you know, laugh about it. Romney, who needs to hire some gag writers whose cultural references come from a decade other than the 1960s, said that Obama had “gone from Jane Fonda to Dr. Strangelove in one week.” “Mein führer, I have the audacity to walk.”


Several candidates meant to say that you needed security before you could have proper democracy, but wound up actually saying that you can have democracy without voting. Giuliani compared Iraq to New York City (only less Jewy), which cowered in fear before he vanquished crime and made the city safe for democracy. Before him, of course, all New York mayors came to power through palace coups, or poisoning their predecessors’ egg cream, or pulling a magic squeegee (called Excalibur) out of the hands of a homeless man (oddly enough called the Lady of the Lake).

Brownback called for a soft partition of Iraq into three parts, just like before World War I. So he intends to re-establish the Ottoman Empire. Sounds like a plan.

Giuliani stole a McCain line (McCain spent the whole debate looking too dazed and dispirited to care all that much) that the D’s in their debates never use the word [sic] “Islamic terrorism,” and this is just political correctness taken too far. Then he upped the ante, coining the term “Islamic extreme terrorism,” which is ever so much worse than Islamic moderate terrorism.


Ron Paul said we should “just come home” from Iraq.

I think we all had the same thought while watching this debate: it would have been so much better if only Jim Gilmore were still in the race.