Pull up a chair and get ready for the clown car

Politics is a serious business. It’s about people’s lives, their hopes, their dreams, their futures. It’s about war and peace and the fate of the planet. It’s wrong to treat it as a sporting event or a form of entertainment.

But not tonight!

Tonight we are being treated to the one time in all of politics when it’s perfectly acceptable, indeed required, to sit back with a cold one and just enjoy the political circus for its sheer entertainment value. Tonight begins the greatest show on earth: the Republican presidential primary debates. And this one is going to be a doozy, featuring as it does the most crowded clown car in Republican primary circus history.

Four years ago, it would have been hard to imagine a more ridiculous field of debaters. The GOP started the festivities even earlier that year — the first Fox debate was in May — with what everyone thought at the time was an excessively crowded field. (Little did we know.) Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry and Jon Huntsman had not even declared yet and Mitt Romney declined the invitation. Only Herman Cain, Gary Johnson(!), Tim Pawlenty, Ron Paul and Rick Santorum debated that night.

It was the first of many cheerfully inebriated progressive Twitter parties all over the country, as Republicans had 20 primary debates between May of 2011 and February of 2012. It’s amazing we didn’t all end up with liver damage. It’s hard to believe looking back on it, but Jon Hunstman appeared in 11 of those debates. Of course America was so riveted by the antics of Bachmann and Cain, the strange behavior of Rick Perry and the unsettling notion that Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum were actual contenders that it’s not surprising he simply didn’t register.

Romney was the frontrunner from the beginning and he benefited from the contrast between him and the weirdos he was running against. His awkward, stiff, dull personality turned out to be an asset. One assumes that Jeb Bush and Scott Walker are hoping for a similar dynamic this time.

The GOP leadership was acutely aware that their primary season had been an embarrassing freak show and sought to exert more control over the process this time. They only scheduled nine debates and came up with extensive rules which are supposed to keep the proceedings dignified and statesmanlike. They had no idea that every single Republican who has ever looked in the mirror and saw a president looking back at them would decide this was their big chance. And who could have ever predicted that billionaires would flood the race with enough cash to entice nearly 20 different candidates to jump in. (It’s probably safe to assume that Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes understood that. All that money’s got to go somewhere, most of it to media.)

It’s such an embarrassment of riches (or just a plain old embarrassment) that Fox News had to create a junior varsity and varsity debate. As always, the JV team is disappointed. Rick Santorum’s spokesman Matt Benyon was fit to be tied:

And what about George Pataki and Jim Gilmore? Chopped liver?