I wrote about the debate for Salon this morning. I don’t have a strong opinion about who won and frankly I don’t care. Both Sanders and Clinton were impressive in my opinion. Mostly, it was just a relief to see that one of the political parties isn’t batshit insane. Sometimes you wonder.
If there’s one thing that was made obvious last night, it’s that the GOP is one big heaping mess of a political party right now. The contrast between it and the Democrats couldn’t be sharper and not just in the presidential race. After all, the backdrop of last night’s event was a drama happening in the Capitol in which House Republicans can’t agree on who should be Speaker. How do they expect, then, to bring the entire country together under one president? It’s laughable. They’re laughable. The candidates on the stage last night in Las Vegas, on the other hand, were serious.
Now it’s true that there might have been some Republicans on their debate stage who aren’t entirely clownish and who, in other circumstances, could show themselves to better advantage. But it’s their party and they can’t cry about this even if they want to. Every last one of them has been instrumental in making the GOP what it is today. All of them would likely be happy to see Trump out of the race and most of them wouldn’t be sorry to see Carson go either. Every day, those two are out there spewing vile racist and anti-semitic rhetoric (among a dozen other offensive comments), making it almost impossible for the Republicans to gain a national majority and win the presidency — even if they could past the unpopularity of the mainstream GOP platform, which is only slightly less repellant.
The differences between the two parties aren’t just matters of debate style unfortunately. Now that we have seen the presidential candidates in both parties on the debate stage, it’s clear that the two parties don’t just have different political philosophies. They represent two different countries.
Republican America is a dystopian hellscape in which evil, violent foreigners are trying to kill us in our beds while rapacious jackbooted government thugs try to wrestle our guns from our cold, dead fingers and Planned Parenthood sociopaths are committing mayhem on children and selling the body parts. And that’s just for starters.
Democratic America is a very powerful nation struggling with a declining middle class and economic insecurity at the hands of the ultra-rich, requiring some energetic government intervention to mitigate income inequality, solve the looming crisis of climate change and manage global crises without plunging the nation into more wars. They also must hold off that anarchistic opposition which sees the world as a dystopian hellscape and that may be the greatest challenge of all.