Watch GOPers B!tch Slap Each Other In Hilarious Mashup, Idiocracy Is Real

If ever you need to explain to somebody the abject mediocrity of the seven candidates who stood on the stage at the Ronald Reagan Library last night, just take out this clip and play it for them. It says far more than anything you can describe. Nobody had high expectations for this debate but nobody expected this level of drivel either. The next debate may be different. It’s set in Miami November 8 and King Donald is actually expected to deign to attend. Or, he may not. Again, the only norm in this election is that all norms are gone.

The Bulwark:

Wednesday night’s GOP presidential debate billed the primary race as a “time for choosing,” but avoided discussing the choice that matters most. It felt like a broadcast from an alternate dimension—one where the Senate had convicted Donald Trump in the January 6th impeachment and barred him from office, freeing up Republicans to leave Trump and all his baggage behind them and hash out serious policy questions.

But back in our reality, Trump, despite having now skipped both of the first two debates, is crushing in the primary polls, with 30-point leads in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada, and more support in the RealClearPolitics national average than every candidate on the debate stage combined.

And yet once again, no one really went after Trump. Viewers saw a traditional mix of arguments, sound bites, self-aggrandizement, and BS, but reticence to challenge the frontrunner. Chris Christie and Ron DeSantis both repeated Nikki Haley’s criticism from the first debate that Trump, like Biden, ran up debt in office. Both tried calling Trump weak for not debating. DeSantis got in a mild shot at Trump as insufficiently pro-life. Christie, in his closing words, called Trump divisive. And that’s about it.

A New York state court just found that Trump committed financial fraud, effectively shutting down major components of his business empire, and none of his supposed competitors made it into a political attack. None tried to make a What type of party do we want to be? case against corruption and authoritarianism.

It was surreal, how the debate moderators avoided the profound, historical question of nominating a man who will be on trial for federal felonies during the campaign. And it was ridiculous that no candidate mentioned that the man they trail in the polls makes anti-democracy assertions on a regular basis, such as recently insinuating that America’s top general should be executed.

It was expected that the elephant in the room would be ignored and that expectation was delivered upon. Trump was not mentioned, except in a few instances. The third GOP debate will have stringent qualifications. A candidate must be polling at at least 3% and have at least 50,000 unique donors, according to the Associated Press. That will most likely wash out Burgum and frankly I don’t think Mike Pence will make it, but maybe I’m wrong.

And that will leave us with an adjudicated rapist and an adjudicated fraudster and who knows about the results of the classified documents or the sedition case. The mind reels. But as your head starts to swim, bear in mind that Trump is not doing this alone. He has the complicity and the incompetence of the entire dysfunctional Republican party behind him.