An Analysis of Last Night's Republican Presidential Game Show

...I think Sam Brownback went home with a complete living room set, but Fred Thompson won the Dodge convertible.

Have they all been that bad? That was one of the least informative, most uncomfortable things I've watched in a long time. I finally tuned in because my man Fred was in. He did fine and had a couple of genuinely good responses, but the format was simply dreadful.

There was a lighting round?!? Who thought of that? Could anyone imagine General Eisenhower being put through a lightning round in a presidential debate? How degrading. They looked like poodles being forced through flaming hoops. The moderators were invasive during the answers. Maybe the best line of the night was when Fred told Chris Matthews, "No one asked you for your opinion, Christopher." Right on, Fred!

Does anyone else think that Rudy Giuliani looks like a lobster? What's with that tiny mouth? I expect to see cilia on either side of it fanning plankton towards it.

Mitt Romney was great last night. His programming was executed perfectly except for that time when his face jammed and froze up in a rictus of a grin while his simulant software routines had to go through a couple of CPU clock cycles to dislodge it.

Seriously, though, has Chris Matthews always been such a total moron? Every question asked had some underlying statist assumption about government intervention. The presidential candidates had to answer how they and their administration were going to have to solve everything from Chrysler losing its checkbook under the couch to kids not flossing at night. Fred had the best serious line of the night when asked about Chrysler.

Maria Bartiromo: Senator Thompson, should the government bail out Chrysler?

Senator Thompson: No.

Rock on! Someone who gets it! I thought Maria was going to have a stroke. A presidential candidate who thinks that the government shouldn't intervene in every element of life? How could this be? She kept modifying the question and adding clauses to it until he finally gave the answer she wanted to hear which was "Yes."

As a sign of just how totally ignorant the moderators were, one of the debate's last questions was to Sam Brownback about the biggest threat to the economy. Sam replied, correctly, "the destruction of the two-parent family." I almost fell out of bed when I heard it. The moderator repeated the question like Sam had answered the wrong one. "No, really, the biggest threat to the economy, Sam!" Sam hit all the right points about education, crime, earning power, tax base and so forth. He was spot on. The moderators looked at him like he had two heads.

I've blasted the MSM before for being out of touch and uneducated, but this was stunning to me. Neither Chris Matthews nor Maria Bartiromo seem to be able to conceive of a nation founded in liberty or personal responsibility. Maybe they should go and moderate a French debate next time. American ones are quite beyond them.

Update: Extreme Mortman saw the same thing I did. He took the time to extract Maria's questions. It's very depressing.