Last night, the surviving GOP candidates met in New Hampshire, America’s quaint Christmas village, for the final debate before the doom-bringing of the New Hampshire primaries. The candidates included America’s most loathesome Canadian, Texas senator Rafael Theodosius Cruz, JC Penney’s Boys Department suit model and part-time junior varsity senator Marco Rubio, anger-spirit and claymation-Christmas-special villain Donald Trump, living Quaalude Ben Carson, and a trio of battered governors: son-of-a-mailman John Kasich, Harkonnen-on-the-Hudson Chris Christie, and sad deflated balloon animal Jeb! Bush. It was not the best of nights for the boy senator.
So, last week, loathesome Canadian Ted Cruz gained the allegiance of Iowa’s pig-men through a canny mix of smarmishmess and Nixonian trickery, and won the Iowa caucuses. Cartoon villain Donald Trump came in second, a fatal weakness. Wee empty suit Marco Rubio came in third, which he somehow interpreted as even better than coming in first because, well, math is hard for the little guy. The media narrative coming out of Iowa was Third good! First bad! Second worst of all! Marco’s losing third-place strong finish meant he had momentum! The party was saved! The great fear of nominating a Canadian who may or may not be a transfigured snow-beast wearing an unconvincing wax mask was over. And Trump’s failure to trumpify in Iowa would spare the party the embarrassment of nominating another cartoon and replicating the disaster of Bonko the Clown’s defeat by Franklin Roosevelt in 1940. The party could rally around the boy senator! All young Marco had to do was not screw up New Hampshire.
Alas.
The debate was hosted by ABC, and held in the ornate Maple Hall at St. Mapleton College in Manchester, which is more or less what passes for a city in New Hampshire. The hall was packed with perfumed dandy maple barons and assorted millionaires, all fondling their checkbooks and waiting eagerly to see a decent establishment candidate not suck at one of these things. Again, alas. The moderators were Martha Radditz and some guy, who I think was that emo Kylo Ren fellow from Star Wars. The candidates were all supposed to emerge one-by-one from some sort of theatrical birth canal, but for some inexplicable reason–drugs?–Ben Carson refused to emerge, even though a stage hand could be seen desperately flapping his arms to get the addled doctor to move. Perhaps he is out of his mind. One by one, the fat governor, the cartoon businessman, the boy, the Canadian, the old governor, and the ghostly full-torso apparition once known as Jeb Bush all waddled, stomped, skipped, or floated ethereally by the blissfully stoned crazy man, giving him WTF glances as they passed.
Once they were all settled, Martha and Kylo Ren explained the rules. Who the hell knows what they were. None of the candidates paid any attention, and I went to check out the liquor cabinet. The first question was for Trump. “Aren’t you a crazy person with bad temperment?” Martha asked. “How can a cartoon villain be president?” Trump waved his stumpy little arms in a jerky, poorly animated manner. “Hey,” he replied. “I wasn’t the asshole who invaded Iraq. Lots of career politicians do dumb things. I’m a businessman. I do smart things. My orphanages and casinos are YOOOGELY successful.”
The audience gasped. The full-torso apparition once known as Jeb Bush wailed and jangled his chains, as he must every time someone mentions his accursed brother. He also became ever-so-slightly less visible. The other candidates all answered temperment questions with variations of “KILL! KILL! KILL!” except the ghostly specter of Jeb Bush, who just moaned, and John Kasich, who responded with some folksy bullshit about having a paper route or something. Kasich has invested heavily in folksy bullshit futures. Cruz shouted that we’re less safe under the administration of Obama, who has had approximately zero 9/11s, than we were under the reign of the guy who had that really big 9/11. Jeb discreetly spat a small blob of ectoplasm every time someone mentioned 9/11. As they all blundered their way through various military and foreign policy questions, we learned many things. Cruz, for example, is a bloodthirsty asshole who doesn’t really know what carpet bombing means, though he likes the way it sounds. Marco Rubio knows fuck-all about missiles. Chris Christie was a federal prosecutor. I learned that several times. Carson’s answers were mostly lyrics to Stevie Nicks songs, near as I could tell. Dude was SO high. Jeb moans a lot. Being a ghost seems to suck.
There were a few notable exchanges between the candidates. Ted Cruz squirmed uncomfortably–almost as if he had a conscience–when asked about his dick move of spreading the rumor that Carson was dropping out on the day of the Iowa caucuses. He blamed CNN, gave a half-assed apology, and Carson responded by softly singing the words to “Desperado.” The specter of Jeb Bush tried to strike at Trump with his ghostly fists, by saying Trump was in favor of eminent domain and throwing little old ladies out of their houses. Trump waved his stubby claymation fingers. “Look, Casper the Loser Ghost–you know that Keystone pipeline you guys are always jerking off to? That’s a thousand friggin’ miles of eminent domain. If you love the Keystone pipeline, you love eminent domain.” Jeb keened, then was silent.
The greatest of the exchanges between the candidates, though, was between Chris Christie and the wee senator from Florida. The wee senator had a line about Obama, “This notion that Barack Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing is just not true. He knows exactly what he’s doing” that he uttered as a sort of weird non-sequitir. When he repeated himself, Christie walked right over to his podium and BADA-BING! blew his brains out all over his nice JC Penney’s Back to School suit. He called Rubio a crappy-ass absentee senator who memorized a bunch of 25-second speeches and didn’t even show up to vote for his own bills and who had never been accountable or responsible for anything. Then he pulled off the senator’s head and made rough love to Rubio’s spurting neck-hole. Over the course of a 3 1/2 minute exchange, an increasingly flustered Rubio repeated the same 20-second speech four times. The full exchange is truly brutal. You could hear millionaires in the audience who had come to see the boy senator quietly put their checkbooks back in their coat pockets. Jeb jangled his chains excitedly again became, for a moment, nearly visible. Chris Christie will never have to pay for a drink in a Trump casino for as long as he lives.
Poor Marco. Marco, Marco, Marco. You did not have a good night. The New Hampshire primary is Tuesday.
