Ten men who will never be President of the United States got on stage last night in a globally embarrassing spectacle that was like a slow motion train wreck. You can't quite watch, but you can't quite look away either. The right wing's TV station manufactured a spectacle that started seductively enough. The specter of any of these men being forced to answer actually tough questions was the ruse that sucked me in. Wow, did Megyn Kelly really take Trump to task about his obvious misogyny? Such initial moments were designed to make us all think this was a real debate amongst credible candidates being asked real questions by tough journalists.
Of course, we know it was nothing more than vaudeville. The theater of the absurd, by the absurd, for the absurd. What was said was bad enough. A neurosurgeon saying the U.S. tax system should be based on the Christian concept of tithing. Cool - I am not Christian, does that mean I don't have to pay? Donald Trump saying he donates to candidates so they take his calls, his own example of which is that he paid Hillary Clinton to come to his wedding. Wow, Donald, you must be really hard up for friends to have to pay people to come to your wedding. Or when the candidates started listing what they have been told by God to do in office, should they get elected. Or, and perhaps this takes the cake, when Mike Huckabee actually said the military is for "killing people."
Sadly though, what was far worse than what was said yesterday is what wasn't said. In a debate for the U.S. Presidency, not a single question was asked about climate change - the greatest global threat we face today. Not a single comment about our crumbling infrastructure. Not a single discussion of energy policy. Nothing about the minimum wage or income inequality. Nothing about plans to generate economic opportunity. Nothing about the growing daily threat of gun violence in the U.S. Nothing about the rash of racially motivated police killings in recent years. Nothing about the rise of domestic terrorists and hate groups in America. And, not one word about massive and ground-up education reform to prepare our kids for the global economy of the 21st century.
Today's reactionary GOP not discussing education isn't an oversight, it is by design. Only by keeping a population relatively poor and tragically undereducated can you perpetuate the lies and myths that enable the GOP to be nothing more than a shill for big oil, the one percent and the gun lobby. Proselytizing lies into an alternate reality only works on an uninformed public who you can easily dupe into believing that it's the illegal immigrants, or universities, or Planned Parenthood, or women, or gays, or "thugs" who are responsible for how their life turned out. Only by creating a self-perpetuating, cult-like hysteria can you keep victims trapped in a reality in which they consciously vote against self-interest, because they have been brainwashed to believe that any facts other than those preached by the leaders of their narrow worldview are done so by people "out to get them."
And that is what we saw last night. A two-hour event missing just one question "and then what?" You get the Mexicans, who Donald Trump says are so much smarter than us, to actually pay for building a huge wall between the U.S. and Mexico. Then what? What do you do with the over 11 million illegal immigrants who are already here, Donald Trump? You reject Obama's Iran deal - which is approved by our European allies and the United Nations - and then what, Ted Cruz? You start another unaffordable, unwinnable war in the Middle East without any allies, without the UN and with the support of the American public? You set "lofty goals" Jeb Bush and then what? How does dreaming turn into a level of growth we haven't seen since Lyndon Johnson? You stop "leading from behind" Scott Walker and then what? You want to massively build up our military while cutting taxes and cutting education budget. Great, so you want a bunch of uneducated morons to operate nuclear submarines. Oh, and you know what, there are no federal subsidies to bail you out when you run the federal government.
I can go on and on, but the tragedy is that the GOP and their media bosses have whipped a gullible public into a frothy state where no one even thinks to ask the question "and then what?" And until that question is asked, we can't begin any serious discussion about solving any real problem of any kind. Hopefully, enough Americans were as mortified by what they saw last night as I was so that the spectacularly embarrassing theater we saw... will stay just that.