The Republican Debate: A Dead Dog Could Beat These Guys:
It's truly hard to pick out the creepiest moment of last night's visit to the Gipper's Chamber of Horrors, the Republican candidates' debate at the Ronald Reagan Library (a name that still makes the Rude Pundit giggle). For sheer crazed insanity, it's hard to beat when John McCain proclaimed about Osama bin Laden, "We will track him down. We will capture him. We will bring him to justice, and I will follow him to the gates of hell," and then he smiled. Not just a regular smile - a full-on face-engulfing, scarred-cheek-stretching smile that McCain must have done thinking about gutting his captors while hanging by his arms on a bamboo wall in the Hanoi Hilton just before they beat him again. Scary, scary stuff.

This had been preceded by Mitt Romney's pledge on bin Laden, "[H]e is going to pay, and he will die," gettin' all Brigham Young on bin Laden's ass. (Here's a fun Brigham Young quote: "Suppose you find your brother in bed with your wife, and you put a javelin through them both, you would be justified and they would be atoned for their sins and be received into the kingdom of God.") And it was done with the same passion that Romney would have if he knocked on your door and tried to get you to receive the Book of Mormon. Robo-Romney, all tan and perfectly-coiffed (how much for his fuckin' hairdo?), was absolutely the kind of guy who, if you saw him walking up to your front door on a Saturday morning, you'd shut off the TV and pretend you're not home.

But his uber-creepy moment was, in answer to what he disliked about America (which is a stupid fuckin' question to begin with), he went on about how molto-splendiferous America is, full of "hardworking, innovative, risk-taking, God-loving, family-oriented American people." And then he said, "It's that optimism we thank Ronald Reagan for." Yep, before Reagan, America was just a cesspool of cynicism and hatred, pessimism and blind adherence to lazy, solitary worship of ancient deities that they sacrificed babies to. But the divorced guy who was an asshole to his kids, gutted poverty programs, and wrecked the American economy, he made us all feel better.

And then there was Rudy Giuliani trying so goddamn hard not to seem like a cross-dressing, multiple divorcee who lived with gay guys. Really. Watching Giuliani de-punk himself was like watching a spider monkey fuck a hippo. Desperately swinging at the fruit from that conservative tree, Giuliani kept talking about staying on the "offense" on terrorism, which, coming from a man who was barely on the terrorism field for eight years, was just damn silly. Still, it was good fun to watch the pro-choice Giuliani hem and haw his way through his incoherent answers to abortion questions: Roe should be overturned, but women should choose, but he supports the Hyde amendment, but he thinks abortions should be paid for by the government, and he thinks the decision should be made by courts and the states, so, really, his answer is: leavemethefuckalone9/11.

As for the rest of the field, who cares?

Nancy Reagan must have loved the sight of all ten of these creepy old men fucking her husband's skull, passing it around to each other to see who could fuck that skull harder. Of course, it was far better than Reagan's skull deserved.

Correction: An earlier version of this referenced Romney hawking The Watchtower, a Jehovah's Witness magazine. Sometimes it's hard to keep your cults straight.