Political Performance Art: Last Night’s WWE Styled Freak-show of a Republican Debate

by Scott Creighton

At one point I fully expected Carly Fiorina to take the stage, stand on her head and shoot ping-pong balls from her vagina while reading her proposed 3 page tax code in Yiddish.

I watched about half of last night’s New Hampshire Republican “debate” before laughing so hard I feel to the floor and passed out from lack of oxygen. Mercifully, it was over before I woke up and the talking heads were busy telling the audience what they were supposed to take from the scripted reality TV show that is the American political system these days. It made me think of some sophomore level high school Current Events class where some dipshit 26-year-old tells a bunch of disinterested 15-year-olds what they are supposed to think of the world around them because he’s so damn experienced and wise.

I’ve said it before, I will say it again…. this kind of scripted circus is exactly what it takes to get another Bush in the White House and after last night I am more convinced than ever that we are doomed to have to suffer the indignation of Jeb 2016 whether the conservatives in this country want it or not.

The freak-show started off with an interesting little performance by Ben Carson. Apparently the neurosurgeon couldn’t figure out how to walk down the little runway they made on the side of the stage. They called his name right after Ted Cruz and he slowly followed him down the runway and then stopped halfway down it with his little hands folded in front of him like a monk or a chipmonk. They made sure to have a camera there to watch the whole thing, rather than cutting to Ted walking across the stage. Some guy from backstage stuck his head around the curtain wall and told Carson to go to his podium, but Ben just stood there and other names were called out and those candidates walked down the runway and past right past him. Eventually Donald Trump’s name was called and he walked up and stood next to Ben and they just stood there. Next was Jeb and he walked by and brushed past the waiting duo shaking his head.

Foreshadowing?

The moderators finally called Trump’s and Carson’s names again and they took their places but of course that messed their sequence and finally noticed an empty podium at the end of the stage where John Kasich was supposed to be. They called him out and the festivities got underway.

You ever seen the entrance of wrestlers at a WWE event? It’s half the show, isn’t it?

Right off the bat, Ted Cruz was asked about the statement he made saying Donald Trump didn’t have the temperament to be president. Cruz backed off the statement giving some canned BS about the voters in New Hampshire making that decision about all the people on stage. He was asked again specifically to explain his statement about Trump and he again gave the same BS answer. Trump jumped on him about not being able to face him with an accusation.

“If you noticed, he didn’t answer your question. That’s what’s going to happen with our enemies and the people we compete against. We’re going to win with Trump. People back down with Trump. That’s what I like and that’s what the country likes.”

Cruz just stood there like a puppet with that televangelist smile on his face and said nothing.

Then it was Ben Carson’s turn to dismiss Ted Cruz and help get him out of the way. The moderator asked Ben about the Cruz Tweets saying he had dropped out of the race while the Iowa caucus was still going on. Ben said at first he wasn’t going to use the occasion to attack Ted, but then he used the occasion to attack Ted saying it was “Washington politics” as usual.

Cruz responded with a bunch of BS, basically blaming CNN for the whole thing. He did look Ben right in the eyes with his televangelist fake sincerity super-powers and apologized to him right there. Ben basically spit in his face right after that saying CNN Tweeted a correction to their mistaken Tweet a minute afterward and asked the audience to draw their own conclusions about what really happened.

Cruz just stood there like a puppet with that televangelist smile on his face and said nothing… again.

We can certainly expect Ted Cruz’ numbers to drop at this Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary.

Then it was Rubio’s turn and this crash and burn was breathtaking in it’s ridiculousness.

Marco Rubio has been steadily building support mostly due to his success at the previous debates. He clearly possesses a quick mind and honed debate skills and I don’t think anyone would challenge those conclusions prior to last night.

Yet remarkably, for some unknown reason, he ended two answers he gave with the same quote and then when called out by Chris Christie for giving “canned, talking point answers”, he did it again.

“Let’s dispel with this fiction that Barack Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing. He knows exactly what he’s doing. He is trying to change this country. He wants America to become more like the rest of the world. We don’t want to be like the rest of the world; we want to be the United States of America.” Marco Rubio

The first time he awkwardly stuck this onto the end of an answer, his fans in the crowd applauded. The second time the stunned crowd sat in silence wondering what was going on. The third time, after Christie said something about it, they actually booed him. Then they cheered when Chris took off the kid gloves.

“You see, everybody, I want the people at home to think about this. That’s what Washington, D.C. does. The drive-by shot at the beginning with incorrect and incomplete information and then the memorized 25-second speech that is exactly what his advisers gave him.” Chris Christie

Rubio stood there like a busted child with a half-smirk on his face.

How is it that someone as gifted as Rubio clearly is at debating did something so obviously disingenuous and self-destructive in an important debate?  It defies common sense. It’s not a mistake. He did it three times and the lines are so long, it would be impossible for him to deliver them without realizing his mistake early and correcting it by simply changing the line. But he didn’t. He kept on going all the way through the shtick. Unless he had a stroke during the debate, Rubio and his handlers were deliberately undermining his one strength in this primary contest.

At one point Rubio tried to make-up ground by saying Obama didn’t stand with Israel enough and that one landed like a turkey dropped out of a WKRP helicopter (“I swear I thought turkeys could fly”)

We can now also expect to see Rubio’s results suffer on Tuesday.

Then there was this bizarre series of questions coming from the female moderator from ABC. I don’t who she was but I swear I thought she was Rita Katz for a minute or so.

All she wanted to ask the contestants was which one would have bombed a rocket in North Korea while it sat on the launch pad yesterday. Any reasonable answer given by any of the candidates that didn’t include starting WWIII with a preemptive strike against the North Koreans was insufficient in her mind and she kept asking different candidates the same question over and over again. I fully expected her to start screeching about the “damn commies” at any minute.

When madame bombs-a-lot asked this of Donald Trump, he first took the opportunity to remind everyone of how much business he does and how some Chinese bank resides in one of his buildings. Then he rationally explained he would use China to put pressure on North Korea and that would fix the problem pretty quickly.

That’s the last thing this crazy woman wanted to hear… we would China to fight our battles for us and Trump won no applause from the crowd with his reasonable answer either. “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” still works in the red states I guess.

The culmination of the coronation of Jeb Bush started right about then.

When I was first watching the pre-game shows on CNN and MSNBC they both kept talking about Jeb making a comeback in the polls and each said something very similar in that they mentioned Jeb’s mother talking about his performance saying she hoped he would be more assertive and interrupt Trump and others more often. Bush was being seen as weak in the eyes of the republicans and she thought he should get a little feisty and have some face-time with The Donald.

And guess what happened next?

Trump was asked about imminent domain, the snatching up of private property for use by the ebil statists. This is obviously the most contentious topic of the debate in the eyes of the free marketeers of the republican party. Any fool would know how to handle this question.

But Donald “Winning” Trump came out in favor of imminent domain saying without it we wouldn’t have roads and schools and whatever else he was going on and on about.

Well, of course, this is the perfect set-up for someone since The Donald was recently ridiculed for having tried to use imminent domain to steal the land from some little old lady so he could park limousines near one of his hotels in Atlantic City. And guess who jumped in to attack The Donald on this one?

Yep. Jeb Bush stood tall and muddled his lines attacking Trump on this issue as best he could. At one point Trump tried to “hush” Bush and he drew thunderous boos from the audience while Bush stood there smiling.

Then Trump went off on some kind of “conspiracy theory” rant about the audience being filled with Bush donors and he spiraled out of control from there.

Little Momma Bush got what she called for. Her second son stood tall against the man and came out looking more presidential in the process.

Of course, Jeb kept flubbing his lines the whole night, choking on the words and backtracking on everything he said to make corrections. I think he did that with every answer he gave and even at one point he called himself the former president of Florida before he corrected that.

And he’s so bad with his delivery, he has this little self-conscience quirk where he twitches when he makes a mistake, jerking his body to the right as he corrects himself so for the whole night, he’s twitching around up there like a chicken-head crack addict. But while he does it, he has this almost Kabuki theater look of deep concern on his face like a guy making his final statement while getting the juice in the electric chair.

From now on I’m calling Jeb “Deep Twitchy”

The last thing I remember before hyperventilating and hitting the carpet was something about Chris Christie asking people to ask The Donald “how” he was going to do anything and The Donald coming back with “I’m the best businessman ever, so there” or something to that effect. Deep Twitchy was picking his nose or playing Candy Crush on his I-phone and I was out.

Apparently they talked about “ISIS” and blowing stuff up after that and each promised they would be the one to give more money to the military industrial complex than anyone else ever did in the history of mankind and they would do so by cutting taxes to the rich and big corporations and that would somehow magically create trillions more dollars for GE, Blackwater and Boeing.

They all said they would build a wall between us and the cheap labor Big Business needs to keep afloat these days. Even Rubio said it but you know they don’t mean it. The wall is going to keep us in, not cheap labor out. You’ll understand that when they start building one up north. Everyone talks about the Great Wall of China for some reason when they mention it. They never mention the wall separating east and west Germany or that thing that keeps the slave labor stuck in the West Bank.

Anyway, watching Deep Twitchy live up to the expectation of Mommy Dearest was more than I could take. I was in hysterics at that point as the moderators tried their best to keep from laughing, the whole time sounding like the has-beens calling the action on any WWE presentation that was ever made.

Rolling on the floor convulsing with laughter, I imagined “Bridge of Doom” Christie coming off the top rope dropping an atomic elbow on a stunned Marco “The Luchador” Rubio while the Trumpster took a beating on the floor from “Momma’s Boy” Bush til Vince McMahon runs onstage and shaves that ridiculous comb-over off his head to the roaring beer-soaked red state applause of the fans.

Chairs fly, Deep Twitchy hoists the belt and they pack up the show till next time four years from now.

Soon enough, PresidentialMania will have come and gone. Buy the tee-shirt, get the hat and suck it up till next time when we will be conditioned to expect even less than the zero they are offering this time around.

It really is a show folks. The Greatest Show on Earth. And even though they seem to think there is a sucker born every minute, don’t take any of it too seriously. It’s just a ride.

But you mark my words. Jeb comes in 2nd or 3rd in New Hampshire via the electronic voting machines (  ) and that propels the “responsible” candidate to ultimate victory in November when he meets “Bernie the Commie” or “Killary the Convicted” for the world heavy weight title, the US of WWE President. OH IT’S ON!!!

It’s real. It’s damn real!

As a matter of fact, when you see another Bush criminal in the White House, you’ll know scripted reality never got so real.

p.s. All you nay-sayers out there who thought I was crazy picking Jeb better than a year ago… huh? Hmmm? I told you to keep watching, didn’t I. 

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