With last night’s 20th Republican Presidential debate, it now seems likely that we have seen the last of the debates until the three Presidential debates and one Vice Presidential debate in the fall.
The end of the debates could not be soon enough, as what they revealed made us wish for them to end mercifully for those of us who felt a commitment to sit through them, while rolling our eyes and covering our mouths in disbelief.
They revealed the incompetence, recklessness, stupidity, and lack of compassion of this motley group of Republicans, past and present, and the horror of imagining any of them becoming our President next January 20.
Sure, some were worse than others, and on that scale, Mitt Romney looks to be the “best” of the survivors, but that is a pitiful test of competence.
To have had such fools as Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, and Rick Santorum even imagining themselves as “qualified” to be President demonstrates the extent of hallucination and arrogance of these four candidates.
Looking back, it could be argued that the two best candidates had no chance at all–Jon Huntsman and Tim Pawlenty–because the GOP crowds at these events proved that they were total airheads and Neanderthals, who one had to believe was just those crowds, and not potential Republican voters nationwide. If this is indeed the norm of Republican registered voters, which with lots of prayer can be hoped is not the case, then this country is doomed to go into the Dark Ages, rather than into the Enlightenment of the future world. But then, the historical Enlightenment was a challenge to, and skeptic of, the power and influence of organized religion over government, and the thought that we are receding into the pervasive influence of religion over government which led to the struggle for separation of church and state is a terrifying sense of deja vu!
The Republican Party has abdicated its right to the Presidency and to control of Congress, until and when they start displaying responsibility, intelligence, and sanity, making them worthy of national power again.
Wanting to believe in the intelligence and humanity of the American people at large, one can only hope reason and compassion win, and that Barack Obama achieves the victory he so richly deserves for dealing competently with the biggest set of problems faced by any President since Franklin D. Roosevelt!