Lefty Bloggers on the GOP Debate: ‘A Two-Hour Slog Through a Septic Tank Overflowing With Bulls**t’

November 11th, 2015 5:29 PM

Robin Williams’s first album was called Reality…What a Concept. More than one lefty blogger implied that Unreality…What a Concept would have been a fitting title for Tuesday night’s Republican presidential debate.

Steve Benen, a producer for MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show and the primary blogger for the program’s web site, sniped, “There’s always considerable chatter about who ‘wins’ or ‘loses’ these debates…but there was one clear loser last night: reality…I kept waiting for one of the candidates to drop the pretense and declare, ‘I reject this version of reality and replace it with one I like better.’”

Two bloggers contended that GOP complaints about media bias in the CNBC debate were part of the reason this event was fact-challenged. New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait remarked, “In a debate where chastened moderators avoided interruptions or follow-ups, the candidates were free to inhabit any alternate reality of their choosing, unperturbed by inconvenient facts. Presumably, the general election will intrude, and the nominee will be forced to make a stronger case against what looks, at the moment, like peace and prosperity.”

Talking Points Memo editor and publisher Josh Marshall argued that “this debate is the logical outcome of the blow up after the CNBC debate. CNBC is a generally right leaning network on economic issues. But simply pressing the candidates to answer questions or noting when they're making demonstrably untrue claims made them liberal. So now we have a debate structured around letting candidates say absolutely anything -- because scrutinizing candidates is [considered] liberal.”

Salon typically lets its freak flag fly when discussing Republicans, and Gary Legum was no exception. Here’s his take on a tax-related disagreement between Marco Rubio and Rand Paul: “These two human-shaped nullities of fetishistic sloganeering stood poised to have a conversation unencumbered by the edifices of misdirection that Republican candidates have to erect to keep the base from noticing it is basically the proverbial frog in a pot of boiling water, sitting calmly while the plutocrats who run the super PACs grab every bit of the nation’s wealth that isn’t nailed down.”

As for the debate as a whole, Legum likened it to “a two-hour slog through a septic tank overflowing with bullshit” and concluded, “The entire Republican primary, and really the entire party, exists somewhere outside the bounds of space and time. There is no reason to think they are ever coming back to Earth.”

In spite of Legum’s efforts, the prize for extraterrestrial-themed ranting about the debate goes to Rolling Stone’s Jeb Lund: “Describing [Ben Carson’s] answers as naive and ‘something you hear in junior high’ insults an educational institution teeming with spontaneous aggression and fervid masturbators. His replies invariably start out sounding like something printed in a book with hard cardboard pages toddlers can chew on with impunity and end up as something orbiting a distant planet.”