Republican debate: What people are looking for is someone to get something done

Transcript, and if I’d known there would be a transcript this time, I wouldn’t have had to sit through that crap-fest. (Update: except the “transcript” is missing some stuff I wrote down).


AND IN SEVERAL MANSIONS: Romney: “Our president doesn’t understand how the economy works. I do, because I’ve lived in it.”

WHAT PEOPLE ARE LOOKING FOR: Santorum: “I think what people are looking for is someone to get something done.” He added, mysteriously, “I’ve done things.”

EVEN IF PERRY PRAYS FOR IT: Huntsman says he hates to rain on the parade of the Lone Star governor, but he did a better job of creating jobs in Utah.

WHAT KIDS NEED: Bachmann says there’s one thing she knows, which is one more thing than I gave her credit for, so good for her, except that the one thing was “Kids needs jobs.”


Ron Paul, a doctor, seemed to say that we don’t need an FDA to test drug safety because drugs do more harm than good. And consumers can decide if cars are safe.

Gingrich: “The fact that President Obama doesn’t come to the Reagan Library to try to figure out how to create jobs...” By reading the stacks of Reader’s Digests? “...tells you that this is a president so committed to class warfare and so committed to bureaucratic socialism that he can’t possibly be effective in jobs.”


Perry says Texas has an uninsured rate of 25% because the people of Texas “would like to see... the federal government get out of their business.”

Gingrich goes on attack against the liberal media, including the debate questioners, saying of the attempt to ask him questions about the candidates he’s competing against, “You want to puff this up into some giant thing.” Which normally is what he pays... oh, you’re all way ahead of me.

JUST POP THE HOOD: Santorum says no one did more than him in “working on the poor.”

Rick Perry then refers to Rick Santorum as “the last individual.” Probably forgot his first name.


Mittens: We’re living like an energy-poor country.

Bachmann defends her promise to reduce gas prices to $2 a gallon: “very time gasoline increases 10¢ cents a gallon, that’s $14 billion [I think the transcript is wrong and she said million] in economic activity that every American has taken out of their pockets.” Wow, every American had $14 billion in their pockets? Let me check. Hey, whaddaya know, she’s right! Fuck this blog, I’m buying Disneyland.

Huntsman says that the price of gas is actually $13 a gallon, “When you add up the cost of troop deployments, when you add up the cost of keeping the sea lanes open for the importation of imported oil” etc etc. So nice to see a politician admit that the wars are for oil.

YOU SHALL NOT CRUCIFY MANKIND UPON THIS CROSS OF GOLD: Ron Paul says he can get us all gas for 10¢ a gallon, because “you can buy a gallon of gasoline today for a silver dime. A silver dime is worth $3.50. It’s all about inflation and too many regulations.”

A NICE INTELLECTUAL CONVERSATION: Perry refuses to talk about what his book said about Social Security’s origins: “it’s a nice intellectual conversation, but the fact is we have got to be focused on how we’re going to change this program.”

CONTEST: What else does Rick Perry consider a nice intellectual conversation. Example: Which is correct, “Yee hah!” or “Yee haw!”?


Romney defends Social Security because “We have always had, at the heart of our party, a recognition that we want to care for those in need”. Say what?

SOME PROVOCATIVE LANGUAGE: Perry: “maybe it’s time to have some provocative language in this country and say things like, let’s get America working again and do whatever it takes to make that happen.”

Bachmann is against the mandatory vaccination of children “and especially by dictate to impose something like an inoculation on an innocent 12-year-old girl.”

WHOA, WATCH THE PROVOCATIVE LANGUAGE, TEX: Perry: “I hate cancer.”

HERE’S WHERE I HAD TO STOP THE DVR AND LAUGH FOR THREE MINUTES: Ron Paul: “These TSA agents are abusive. Sometimes they’re accused of all kinds of sexual activities on the way they maul people at the airport. So the airlines could do that.” He adds that 9/11 was the fault of the feds not allowing pilots to carry guns.

Paul has a plan to end all our wars: “if we did that and took the air conditioning out of the Green Zone, our troops would come home.”

Perry says Texas’s crappy education record isn’t so crappy, and anyway it’s crappy because Texas shares a border with Mexico. Stoopid Mescins.

And when Obama says the border is safe, “he was an abject liar to the American people.”

Ron Paul says darkly that the border fence all the other candidates want – “this fence business” – is actually “designed and may well be used against us and keep us in. In economic turmoil, the people want to leave with their capital. And there’s capital controls and there’s people control. So, every time you think of fence keeping all those bad people out, think about those fences maybe being used against us, keeping us in.”


Perry says he tips his hat to Obama over killing bin Laden but actually he gives more – well, the NYT transcript says props but I heard him say that he gives more probes to the Navy SEALS.

Santorum says Obama only bombed Libya because “the United Nations told him to.”

John Harris asked Perry which scientists he finds most credible on global warming. For some reason, Perry didn’t name any scientists.

Gingrich says he would fire Ben Bernanke tomorrow. Does the president have the power to summarily fire the chairman of the Fed? No, no he does not.

Gingrich wants to “liberate” much of Alaska for natural resource extraction.

Perhaps the greatest applause of the evening was when a question to Perry began by noting that he’d presided over 234 executions (the question was whether he ever had difficulty sleeping because he might have executed an innocent person) (No, he never has); the follow-up asked about that reaction. Perry said it was because “Americans understand justice.”