Republicant's

Stuff I learned watching the Republican presidential debate on Fox (besides the fact this campaign will certainly give me an ulcer before it’s over):

I'm sure you fine folks weren't watching, and I only caught about 30 minutes with half an ear tuned in. But here's a quick summary.

Ron Paul was making a whole lot of sense about the risks of U.S. intervention in the Middle East and the blowback we can expect from meddling with people we don’t understand who hate us. But then he made some loopy mistake about how our bombing of Iraq in the 90s helped contribute to 9/11. Which allowed Giuliani to break format with a self-righteous I AM THE GOD OF 9/11 superiority, demanding Paul retract his statement.

I'm convinced Ron Paul got flummoxed – but only slightly – when discussing the pre-9/11 landscape. He was speaking of U.S. involvement in the Middle East overall, and used the bombing of Iraq as a particularly bad example, somehow falsely linking Saddam and 9/11 again. He couldn't have possibly meant it as the trigger for 9/11, and would have been better to point out the stationing of troops in Saudi Arabia after the first Gulf War, as bin Laden has to explain his justification for the attack.

Paul, to his credit, stuck to his guns in the face of Mr. 9/11 and continued to make the larger point of U.S. foreign policy actually, you know, affecting foreign attitudes toward America. Radical stuff, eh?

Paul mocked the attitudes of Republicans who persist in the fantasy that al-Qaida and radical Islamists “hate us for our freedom.” Because they are so very much involved in planning attacks on Norway, Sweden and Japan.

In today’s Rovian Republican Party, you can’t even broach the subject of why and how our actions might have consequences. Ron Paul should have made it clear that these actions in no way justified 9/11 – only true America-haters believe that. Groups like al-Qaida can’t ever be appeased, only destroyed. But the Muslim world is not a monolith with al-Qaida at the head. Before the Iraq invasion, they were marginalized and virtually shunned. Now we’ve really set the shitstorm in motion, just like they wanted.

It’s a sad state of affairs when the supposed “conservative” party shouts down a debate about the sensible notion that U.S. foreign policy can have repercussions. That it’s only prudent to understand our enemies and sometimes alter our strategy based on the avenue least likely to get us attacked by a growing hoard of once-moderate and now-radicalized Muslims. Can any rational person believe we are safer now than four years ago? The GOP is now trying to ban Ron Paul from future debates, to the detriment of that fallen party and any legitimate interest in national defense.

On a side note, after the debate Giuliani continued to walk the line between his social liberalism and his need to earn Christianist votes in the primary election. He gushed over statistics showing how during his time as mayor, abortions decreased and adoptions increased. Um, Rudy. How, exactly, did you accomplish this? Might as well take credit for the excellent rainfall you received during your tenure.

Actually, there is deep irony in this. Even Rudy’s opponents often credit him with the dip in crime while he was mayor (even though it began under Dinkins, thanks to increases in the police force he instigated). But the authors of Freakonomics credit the decrease in crime on – get this – abortion. Children who disproprotionately grow up comitting crimes in their teens and early 20s because they were born to single and/or teenage city women of limited means and social standing, weren’t in their teens and early 20s in the 90s. Why? Because starting in 1973, they had been aborted. Thank you, Roe v. Wade. Sorry, Rudy.

Back in the debate, McCain and Giuliani insisted that the terrorists will follow us home from Iraq. "America's Mayor" actually had the audacity to point to New Jersey’s Fort Dix Six as evidence of this. Because ethnic Albanians who have lived here for decades are somehow related to the war in Iraq how?

After the debate, Alan "Puppy Dog" Colmes actually asked the pro-torture/they'll-follow-us-home candidates some hard questions. But he never followed up with the obvious rejoinders: What is stopping them from following us home now? How can you use the Fort Dix thing to support this argument? We're still in Iraq! They're here! What's the connection?

Mitt Romney strikes me as the kind of president who has been plotting a way all his life to get to power so he can eat the blood of babies and start a nuclear war. He’s Martin Sheen from The Dead Zone. I'm not sure why I believe this. Maybe because he supports doubling the size of Guantanamo Bay so the terrorists have no access to lawyers. As though you are a terrorist because you’ve been accused of being a terrorist after being rounded up by foreign militias on the battlefield. As though the hundreds of people we’ve released from Gitmo are all of a sudden no longer dangerous after four years. As though the president of the United States should not stand for civil liberties and protections against tyranny. But no. Romney – like Bush and Cheney and “Fredo” Gonzoles – are all hunky-dory with tyranny.

Tom Tancredo had the audacity to follow up McCain's unassailable case against torture (because, he noted, no knowledgeable military brass support it: doesn't work, endangers our troops, and they know there is more to a war than the battlefield. Also, um, McCain was tortured for five years in a Vietnamese prison so maybe he’s kind of an authority?) Tancredo said if the U.S. suffered an attack at home with another likely on the way, he'd want Jack Bauer time. He actual invoked a fictional character to support his stand on torture. Fucking Joel Surnow.

The most vexing aspect of the torture debate was that it was predicated on a scenario set up by Twit Hume involving suicide attacks in the United States. So the candidates had free reign to invoke the ticking-time-bomb defense, which most resembles “24,” least resembles real-life, and is no basis for a sound, universal interrogation policy. Do these crazy people realize how talking tough to the American people makes us into monsters around the world? That it was torture by Egyptian authorities that turned al-Qaida number two honcho Ayman al-Zawahiri from a radical into an ultra-radical bent on mass killing and global jihad at all costs?

And the thing that got me screaming at the television was when Rudy defended torture in the post-show Hannity masturbation session by saying, as president, he'd be sworn to uphold and defend the United States of America. WRONG! It's the CONSTITUTION you are upholding and defending, you lisping, crazy-woman-and-cousin-marrying, ego-maniacal, crony-enabling, pandering dipshit! Without the Constitution, this country just ain't worth defending. Without our Constitutional liberties and protections, all we have left is just some land and our fears.

Blargh. I watch this stuff because this country is slipping farther and farther toward a point of no return. If any of these clowns are elected next year, I don't think there is any turning back. We will become everything the world hates about us. More so.