Debate Preview: The Headless Horsemen Go Riding By

[babylonsister]

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/cnn-republican-debate-arizona-6789340

Debate Preview: The Headless Horsemen Go Riding By
By Charles P. Pierce
at 12:04AM


Illustration by DonkeyHotey via Flickr/Special to The Politics Blog

After months of memories, a proxy war between the final four takes a two-hour break so they can look at each other again.

(Optional soundtrack to this blog post @ link...)

It should be A Very Special Episode, this Wednesday night's season finale of the 1,329,465,771.5 Republican debates. They should invite the whole cast back, all the people who left the show for their own spinoffs, the way they brought Rhoda and Phyllis back when Mary Richards got fired at WJM. Look, here's Herman Cain, and there's Michele Bachmann, and there's Rick Perry, stumbling and falling into the potato salad. And there's the formerly invisible Jon Huntsman. Who knew he was so tall?

They can reprise all their familiar catchphrases.

"9-9-9!"

"I raised 249 children on a tax lawyer's salary."

"It's three agencies of government when I get there that are gone..."

"Is this on? Hello? Testing?"

Won't be a dry eye in the house, I'm telling you.

snip//


It's hard to remember how they actually react to one another, much less what they might say to each other. Rick Santorum has been talking like a religious nut for two weeks now, but that's unlikely to come up, since both Willard Romney and N. Leroy Gingrich, Definer Of Civilization's Rules And Leader (Perhaps) Of The Civilizing Forces, have been rendered by their own rhetoric — and by the length and breadth of the demented political party in which they are running — incapable of making an issue out of the fact that Santorum is such an incredible dick, and have I mentioned that recently? The debate's in Arizona, so I suspect we're going to get a real workout on immigration, and the fence, and arming the border, and the Hezbollah training camps on the Mexican border. It's entirely possible that Willard's old gardeners may come up again. As best I can recall, Santorum's worried about Arab terrorists sneaking across the border, Willard's worried about "amnesty," and Newt wants to set up an immigration board in every city and town to pass on the eligibility of people's gardeners to stay in this country. At which point, Ron Paul will say something about the federal reserve, and everybody will bolt awake again. Then they'll all thank Arizona Governor Jan Brewer for being a crackpot.

For a long time, these debates were the great unifying force in the nomination process. There was one every week or so, and you could count on them being the gravitational force that held the news cycle together for two or three days. Now, though, everybody has their own bankroll and everybody's on their own hook, and they don't seem to be running against each other but, rather, running for the presidency of their own private Americas. None of us live in any of them, of course.