Despite my decision to only watch excerpts and summaries of the Republican Debate this evening, I tuned in live a few times and mostly heard government-bashing and a lot of folks who sounded like Jim Webb complaining they weren't being allowed to say enough. Also, no matter what the problem is, someone was able to say, "I have a plan for that" without explaining what the plan is.
I fault the debate format as much as anything else. Thirty seconds to explain how you'd grow the economy? If your plan to grow the economy can be explained in under five minutes, it's probably so vague and lacking in specifics as to be meaningless. Anyone can say, "We'll bring jobs back from Mexico" when no one's going to ask him to explain how.
And don'tcha love Mike Huckabee taking the fearless stand that we should eradicate deadly diseases? Who's going to argue that one? And if you asked him just how that's to be accomplished, he'd probably say, "We'll make sure the researchers focus on this," as if no one's on that case right now. (This, by the way, is the same Mike Huckabee who used to do ads for a bogus Alzheimer's cure and who doesn't trust scientists on Climate Change.)
After, I heard Donald Trump complaining that the candidates didn't get as much time to talk as Hillary had in the Democratic debate. And this is the same Donald Trump who bragged about getting them to make the Republican debate shorter. No one pointed out to him that maybe Hillary got more time to talk because she was sharing the stage with four other people instead of nine.
But really, I do blame the debate itself. It's a silly format and the CNBC moderators asked a lot of lame questions and allowed themselves to be bullied into letting some candidates talk out of turn. Ten Democrats up there might have been just as bad.
They should do these things like Musical Chairs. First debate, you have to be polling at 2% to get in…second debate, 4%…third debate, 6% and so on. When it gets down to four candidates, freeze the number there.
One other thing: I heard Ted Cruz do his big applause line about a flat tax that's so simple everyone can do the math on a postcard…then we can get rid of the Internal Revenue Service. This country is never going to try this but if it did, who's going to collect and process the postcards and the checks, make sure no one is lying about their income and then go after those who don't file at all? If you get rid of the I.R.S., you're just going to have to invent a new agency to do all that and give them all the same powers that the I.R.S. now has. Of course, I guess we could do it all on the honor system, right?