Republican Debate: Sex is not an issue. It should not be an issue. Leave it alone. Keep it to yourself,

I couldn’t find a transcript for the Republican debate last night, so I thought I was off the hook but oh look, here it is, sigh. The debate was sponsored by Google and the Florida Republican Party. Make your own joke about old people and computers.


Perry brags of tort reform that “told personal injury trial lawyers, don’t come to Texas”. Evidently no personal injury trial lawyers are Texans, they all sneak in from elsewhere, possibly Mexico.

234 EXECUTIONS? Perry: “People understand that the state of Texas, during the last decade, something special happened there.”



Romney says Obama has hurt the middle class, but when asked to define where the category of the rich begins, absolutely refused: “I don’t try and define who’s -- who’s rich and who’s not rich,” adding, but if you buy a McMansion as a vacation home, then knock it down to build a bigger one, you might just be... a completely regular guy, who’s middle class just like you. JUST. LIKE. YOU.


Asked how much people should pay in taxes, Michele Bachmann said zero. “You should get to keep every dollar that you earn. ... Obviously, we have to give money back to the government so that we can run the government, but we have to have a completely different mindset. And that mindset is, the American people are the genius of this economy. It certainly isn’t government that’s the genius.” Um, right.

Oh, and Obama has “destroyed the economy.”

Santorum wants to ban collective bargaining by public-sector unions.

Gingrich opposes extending unemployment benefits without mandatory “training.” “I believe deeply, people should not get money for doing nothing,” adding that he prefers giving people Tiffany jewelry in exchange for blowjobs.

Perry: “For those people that are approaching Social Security, they don’t have anything in the world to worry about,” adding, except for their approaching deaths, of course.

Romney and Perry each accuse the other of retreating from things they wrote in their own books. Next week, they’ll be discussing The Bridges of Madison County. Romney adds, “And I believe that the people of this country can read my book and see exactly what it is,” adding, except for people who went to school in Texas, obviously.


Governor Romney, is Obama a socialist? He won’t say, but “what President Obama is, is a big-spending liberal. And he takes his political inspiration from Europe and from the socialist democrats in Europe. Guess what? Europe isn’t working in Europe. It’s not going to work here.” Remember, Romney knows all about Europe, from all that time he spent failing to get French people to convert to Mormonism.

Romney makes a widdle joke: “I only spent four years as a governor. I didn’t inhale.” Really, the RomneyBot’s manufacturers should have made him more life-like.

Santorum, near as I can make him out, calls for the abolition of state education, because it interferes with parental responsibility to educate their children.

Everyone is against the federal government having any role in education whatsoever. Most say they would shut down the Department of Education, no one says they would keep it open. And they want school choice and vouchers.

Romney says the talk about smaller classrooms being a good thing is just propaganda by the teachers’ unions. He says as president he will stand up to the national teachers’ unions, which is odd because he just said that we need to get the federal government out of education.

Romney says he “just can’t follow” Perry’s argument that children of undocumented aliens should be educated. He calls it a magnet.


Perry says “if you say that we should not educate children who have come into our state for no other reason than they’ve been brought there by no fault of their own, I don’t think you have a heart,” risking offending the largest constituency in the Republican party, those without hearts.

Romney on Israel: “You don’t allow an inch of space to exist between you and your friends and allies.” Kinky. “The right course -- if you disagree with an ally, you talk about it privately. But in public, you stand shoulder-to-shoulder with your allies.” So foreign policy should be secretive and hypocritical and hidden from the American people. No change there, then.

Oo, a hypothetical, everyone loves a hypothetical: what would you do if the Pakistan’s nuclear weapons fell into the hands of the Taliban. Perry says that he would already have built “a relationship in that region,” which Obama hasn’t. What, military aid and drone attacks aren’t a relationship?

Perry refers to Pakistan as “the Pakistani country.”

Also, he’d sell weapons to India. And Taiwan. Because that would totally help if the Taliban got nukes.

Santorum thinks we should establish relationships with exiled President Musharraf, and then would respond to the hypothetical, which he reinterprets as a Taliban coup in Pakistan, by invading Pakistan and re-installing Musharraf as dictator.


THIS IS MY RIFLE, THIS IS MY GUN: After the famous booing by the audience of the gay soldier, Santorum said: “I would say any type of sexual activity has absolutely no place in the military.” Except jerking off to prisoners of war stacked in naked human pyramids, obviously. “And the fact that they’re making a point to include it as a provision within the military that we are going to recognize a group of people and give them a special privilege to -- to -- and removing ‘don’t ask/don’t tell’ I think tries to inject social policy into the military.” (Heh, he said “inject”). Pretending that gay people don’t exist and ordering them to repress evidence of their sexuality is, I guess, somehow, not injecting social policy into the military. Note that Santorum stalled out when he tried to say what “special privilege” gay people would be getting. He said said that in the future, “we would move forward in conformity with what was happening in the past. Which was, sex is not an issue. It should not be an issue. Leave it alone. Keep it to yourself whether you are heterosexual or homosexual.” (Heh, he said keep “it” to yourself.)



Ron Paul: “nobody can out-do me on respect for life. I’ve spent a lifetime dealing with life.”

Applause line:

WALLACE: Mr. Cain, you are a survivor of stage 4 colon and liver cancer. And you say, if Obamacare had been...

(APPLAUSE)

Given how the audiences at these things have been behaving, I can only assume that they were applauding stage 4 colon and liver cancer.

Bachmann denies ever having said that the HPV vaccine causes retardation. “I didn’t make that claim nor did I make that statement.” She adds that Perry “gave parental rights to a big drug company.”

HOW PERRY WILL ALWAYS ERR: Perry says he “erred on the side of life” and he will always err on the side of life.

WHAT NO OTHER PEOPLE ON EARTH DO: Romney: “We place our hand over our heart during the playing of the national anthem. No other people on Earth do that.”

WAY TO MAKE FUN OF A DUDE WITH ALZHEIMER’S, FROTHY: Santorum: “The last words Ronald Reagan said as president of the United States in his farewell address, he was concerned about the future of our country because we were forgetting who we were, didn’t remember what America was really all about.”



Johnson made a dog shit joke.

Asked who among the other candidates they’d pick as their running mate, Johnson said Paul, Santorum said Gingrich, Gingrich called the question a “Hollywood game,” adding, “I don’t have any idea who I would pick as the vice presidential nominee.” He’s really thought through this whole running-for-president thing, hasn’t he? Perry indulges in some slash fiction: “I don’t know how you would do this, but if you could take Herman Cain and mate him up with Newt Gingrich, I think you would have a couple of really interesting guys to work with.” Um, right. Paul, Romney and Bachmann refuse to answer, or to say who they’d like to see pair up. Huntsman says he’d pick Cain, because they have similar taste in ties (yellow).