A succinct and funny analysis of last night’s GOP debate

Romney and Perry at last night's GOP debate. (Courtesy of the Huffington Post.)

Confession: I had better things to do than watch the GOP debate last night after pedaling my exercise bike during the evening news. See, I was reading for the first time Molly Ivins can’t say that, can she? Published in 1991, how had I missed it? Here’s a quote from Ivins’s introduction:

One of my heroes is William Brann, the great populist, who edited a paper called The Iconoclast in Waco before the turn of the century. Brann, a fearless man, loathed three things above all others: cant, hypocrisy, and the Baptists. “The trouble with our Texas Baptists,” he once observed, “is that we do not hold them under water long enough.” But there he was in the Vatican City of the Baptists, and for his pains, one fine day in 1898, on a wooden sidewalk, an irate Baptist shot him in the back. Right where his galluses crossed. But the story has a happy ending, on account of, as he lay dying on the sidewalk, William Brann drew his own gun and shot his murderer to death. Me, I hoped to go like Brann. A martyr to honest journalism.

Anyway, NY Times columnist Gail Collins, who could be described as Molly Ivins without the Texas drawl, told me all I needed to know of what transpired at the Reagan Library last night. Go ahead and read it fer yoreselves:

It was a dark and stormy night.

Except in those parts of the country where it was dry and fire-prone. But what did America care about the weather when it had the chance to forget about its troubles on Wednesday night and curl up with eight candidates for the Republican presidential nomination?

The voters have a lot to figure out. What would it be like to have a president who continually tells the country he’s going to get the working class workin’? And is there something going on with Mitt Romney’s hair? The dark part is looking darker and those little white tufts around the ears are getting whiter. It makes his forehead look as if it’s levitating.

The Republican nominating campaign has thus far been one long primal scream from party members desperate to avoid making Romney their nominee. Really, they will look at anybody. Remember the Donald Trump moment? Michele Bachmann, Front-Runner? Who knows where their glazed eyes will turn next? Rudy Giuliani is now running around saying that he might get in the race “if I think we are truly desperate.”

Just the same, Collins didn’t miss Romney’s smackdown of Rick Perry:

And Romney cleaned Perry’s clock on Social Security. Young Americans, if you dream of someday running for president, try not to write any books calling Social Security a Ponzi scheme.

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