Some people seem to think the Republicans are staging way too many debates. Heck no. We can never have enough.
By my count, there have been 13 since spring, and 14 more are on tap. This is welcome news, because the GOP is staging one of the great reality shows, with a rollicking cast of colorful characters who keep getting voted off the island but keep coming back for more.
There's a cliff-hanger every week.
Will Rick Perry master the English sentence and reclaim his cognitive memory?
Will Michele Bachmann utter another whopper that is light-years from factual reality?
Will Newt Gingrich double-down on his claim that Freddie Mac paid him big bucks for his advice "as a historian"?
Will Herman Cain demonstrate that he knows the difference between Afghanistan and what he has called "Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan"?
Will Rick Santorum volunteer to personally lead the first bombing raid on Iran?
Will Jon Huntsman stop reminding viewers that he looks like Ricky Ricardo on I Love Lucy?
And then there's Mitt Romney, still the likely 2012 nominee, who stares at his hapless rivals with a look best described as polite patrician bemusement, as if to say: "Keep talking, inferiors. The deeper you dig your holes, the easier it will be for me to bury you with my money."
Not that he's so great, either. In a debate Nov. 12, Romney said we should stay in Afghanistan for three more years - thereby undercutting what he said in a debate in June, when he urged U.S. troop removals from Afghanistan "as soon as we possibly can," and insisted that we shouldn't fight "a war of independence for another nation." But stay tuned. Which way will the weather vane spin next time?
That June debate was so long ago that T-Paw was still a candidate. Surely you remember T-Paw. Tim Pawlenty's people gave him that nickname in the vain hope that it would inject some pizzazz into his vanilla persona. He should have stuck around, because lately the cable networks have been smothering the candidates in so much glitz that you'd swear they were finalists on The X Factor. And some of the introductory music has been great. Where else can you see a pizza marketer cross the stage to the strains of martial trumpets best suited for a testosterone summer movie?
