I stoods all I could stands

and I can't stands no more

Even under the best circumstances (i.e. sober) I take very poor notes. As a young corp comms factotum assigned to cover business conferences I wasted many sweaty hours hunched over a shitty miniature tape recorder trying to pick the consonants out of whatever David Frost and Steve Case were murmuring. And if you’ve seen my old alicublog debate and SOTU coverage you know I was shooting ellipses like Celine and basically just getting the gist of the gist. (I was usually right on, but that wasn’t hard, those guys’ talking points were more reliable than German train timetables.)

Nowadays I get permission to tape and let the machine make me a transcript. That’s for the straight job. For contemporary political stuff I can’t make myself do it because I can’t make myself feel and act as if it means something. I mean, you can go to the prestige press and get cleaner quotes from people who were hired to watch the whole thing if you want. I came in late and am guessing I’ll nope out in half an hour.

In fact I’m going to excerpt mode from jump on Wednesday’s Republican Debate:

Nikki Haley on Ron DeSantis: “I said his Don’t Say Gay bill doesn’t go far enough.” Ooookay. She seems eager, not to say anxious, to defend her ultra-right cred — “I was a Tea Party candidate for governor” —  which makes sense, since no one who isn’t eight miles right of a Bircher is watching this.

(I wonder if any of the audience jackals howling after every response even remember what the Tea Party was. I don’t mean they’re too young, I mean they’re senile.)

DeSantis roars — or does his castrati version of a roar — that Haley’s mobbed up with “Reed Hoffman, George Soros Jr.,” and that Haley’s weird plan to require social media users to identify themselves means she wants “every American to be doxxed,” which is sort of right but made less true by the buzzword, like saying “Democrats want Trump canceled for treason.”

DeSantis and Ramaswamy are also mad that Haley got money from Boeing, and jointly beat up on her, knowing Republicans stopped being courtly about female candidates a couple of Hillarys ago. “They’re just jealous,” Haley says. Relatable! Like Taylor Swift and Shake It Off!

DeSantis further thunders that corporations that use ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) factors to determine their investments are trying to “change society without going through the constitutional process,” which suggests that conservatives think private decisions should be subject to their crackpot idea of constitutionalism (which, as expressed by the Federalist Society, means “The Right gets their way”).

Vivek Ramaswamy yells that “the only person more fascist that Joe Biden today is Nikki Haley” which I gotta says leads the field so far in Pull-Quotes That Will Completely Confuse Any Normal Person.

Christie tells them they’re all full of shit, which is even more relatable than Haley’s approach, and makes clear his candidacy is for #1 Republican Anti-Trump Talking Head after the election. Bet David French is pissed!

Everyone seems to think Biden, who has totally bent over for Bibi since October 7, is siding with Hamas. “This administration is trying to hobble Israel,” squeals DeSantis. “They do nothing but try to kneecap them.” He brags on having been in the service (his big job was apparently watching prisoners get tortured) and, when asked what he’d do as President about the Americans killed by Hamas, counsels “turning the screws” on Iran, who apparently run Hamas.

Christie says banana oil to DeSantis’ “hosannahs to the military” and his avoidance of the Hamas question — Christie would “absolutely,” “damn right” send the U.S. military into Gaza.

Ramaswamy figures this butch talk is his cue to beat some more on Haley, who he claims “can’t tell the difference between where the U.S. and Israel are on the map.” Not that he’d send troops himself — that’s neo-con stuff, and Ben-Gurion wouldn’t have wanted us to (ha ha, what). Instead Ramaswamy proposes to “smoke the terrorists on our southern border.”

All this slightly excites the crowd — but not as much as it would have in days of yore, when if I said “9/11” you said “Never Forget.” Today’s GOP voter has been told over and over there’s a “Deep State” behind everything America does that they don’t like or understand, including foreign wars that waste money that could have used to prosecute drag queen story hours and make women mind menfolk, and this bullshit version of anti-militarism has kind of spoiled the foreign-adventure blood-lust that used to always pep them up. Despite all the yelling, it seems being a Republican nowadays is a sad business.

Haley agrees that “Iran gave the green light to Hamas,” says she dealt with Iran at the UN (what, saw them in the cafeteria?) and therefore knows “they only respond to strength.” But she thinks Russia was in on it too: “Hamas butchered those people on Putin’s birthday,” she says, which is a conspiracy theory I have to admit is new to me.

Ramaswamy yells, “these people want to send your sons and daughters to die in Ukraine.” Christie tells him to shut up, with which everybody, at the debate and on planet Earth, agrees, and says that while Christie was 9/11ing Ramaswamy was “sitting with his smart-ass friends at Harvard.” The crowd likes this because it’s yelling, which is butch, and involves “shut up,” which is how they talk to their kids/wife, and does not involve any actual stakes for the country these horrible people propose to run.

And that’s it, 30 minutes, I can’t take anymore. (Especially since the moderator said the next part would be about the “Southern border.”)

…OK. It’s been a while. I’ve been sitting here terrified, but I reckon now I have the nerve to turn the video back on —

Haley’s yelling about bathroom bills and trans kids. DeSantis claims she’s soft on “boys going into a girls bathroom.” Haley says she’s tough on keeping trans women out of women’s sports, which is “the civil rights issue of our time…” Ramswamy says Haley is a “woke Dylan Mulvaney” candidate because by emphasizing that she’s a woman she practices “identity politics” which is a “cancer” —

Now Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch joins us on video —

It got so bad when the commercial break came on and I heard “I won’t let my moderate…” I assumed he was talking about his opponent in a political race until in the next second the guy said “…to severe plaque psoriasis symptoms define me.” I’m out. But if I know you guys, you couldn’t take much more of this yourselves.