GOP Follies: Another Debate

MSNBC liveblogged the debate last night from a Ron Paul supporter’s house, with their TV coverage cutting back and forth between there and an assembled cross-section of GOP voters gathered in an upscale Michigan home to watch the debate on a big screen TV. The interaction between the two groups was entertaining at times.

The Ron Paul gathering's host was apologetic about not being in an OWS encampment, mumbling something about “pigs” and it being “freakin’ cold out there…” He and his assembled friends, a greasy-haired sloucher’s brigade in beards and t-shirts, draped over nondescript furniture in his mother’s working class home, expressed scorn for all things non-Ron Paul.

“That chubby old white haired guy looks like a mean Santa Clause who got his beard shaved off,” observed a giggly, glassy-eyed girl curled up cosily on the floor and gripping a mug of chai tea.

For reasons known only to them, they were most agitated by Romney, who reminded one stoner of the principal who expelled him from school for making out under the bleachers.

"Dude, he's like so upright and never makes a mistake. And what does he put in his hair, shellack?" said 23-year-old anti-war activist Shay Leggard.

Back at the Republican gathering, a distinguished-looking Romney supporter, nattily dressed in tan slacks, white shirt and blue blazer, impatiently dismissed the Romney criticism as "the ramblings of pot-smoking draft-dodgers."

"That's bogus, dude!" countered Leggard, spilling bong water all over his medical marijuana card, adding an emphatic "dammit," before warning reporters to clear out before his mom got home from work and "got all pissed because there's too many people in the house."

The debate itself produced some flashes of entertainment. Here are a few highlights

Ensconced behind his specially-made preacher-style lectern, which he insisted be embossed with "The Cross of Jesus," Rick Santorum elicited a self-righteous roar from the crowd of true believers by shouting unprompted,

“Like all good Americans, I worship our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ!”

With a politician's sense of a winning issue, he doubled down: “Barack Hussein Obama worships a false god, a pagan idol named Gaia!”

Mitt Romney, thumbing through a Berlitz Dictionary of Conservative Words, insisted grimly that he is not a liberal.

At one point, Romney sternly intoned, “As president I will be frighteningly Reaganesque!”

Ron Paul, between spasmodically bawling “no more endless war!” urged Americans to learn how to stop worrying and to love the Iranian bomb.

Newt!  He won't crush a church in your town

Bedlam broke out when Newt Gingrich, glaring at the moderator through a seriously furrowed brow, slowly and deliberately produced a flamethrower that he had secreted behind his podium, fired it up, and incinerated the panels’ table at the left edge of the stage, catching Anderson Cooper’s slacks on fire and sending Obama’s minions scattering and clamoring for safety.

The massive fireball also briefly set the stage curtains ablaze, but they were quickly extinguished. The rabid crowd, tired of being scolded and shushed by the nannying moderators all evening, whooped and hollered for a full five minutes, raining catcalls and derisive laughter down on the cowering inquisitors.