WASHINGTON: The only thing missing at the end of the debate was blood on the floor.
Republican
presidential candidates slashed and scythed each other verbally on stage in vicious exchanges in Detroit on Thursday night that often plumbed the depths, even going below the belt once.
But after calling each other phony, fraud, conman, liar, con artist etc, in two hours of poisonous barbs, the candidates pledged to back whoever was the eventual winner of the party nomination race.
Fat chance — even as Donald
Trump
, Marco Rubio and Ted
Cruz
shook hands with ill-disguised hostility at the end of the toxic debate — although politics, as everyone knows, is the art of the possible.
The great comedic genius George Carlin once mocked what he called America’s “bigger dick foreign policy”, which he said was born from the insecurity of leaders about the size of their anatomy, which is what caused them to wage wars and bomb distant countries — so that they could feel better about their manhood. No one ever thought that subject would come on stage in mainstream politics, let alone in a presidential debate.
But smarting over comments on the size of his hands, which he read as a putdown about other parts his anatomy, Donald Trump huffed, “Look at those hands!” as he held them up spread fingered during his opening remarks. “He referred to my hands — if they’re small, something else must be small …. I guarantee you there’s no problem,” Trump added to titters in the audience in the Fox studio that comprised largely of supporters who cheered all his assertions.
There were incredibly petty and mean-spirited moments in the two-hour debate that consisted mostly of charges and countercharges while ducking and weaving on policy positions. “This little guy”, “Little Rubio”, “Lying Ted”, were some of the epithets Trump used. “Breathe, Donald, Breathe…count to 10,” Cruz advised Trump at one point during the debate.
Polls show the Republican rank and file are in thrall of Trump and his tall promises, and he will win a sufficient number of delegates and the nomination, unless the old guards of the GOP resort to some political shenanigans and serious skullduggery to stop him. That effort was evident on stage as Rubio and Cruz attacked Trump after former presidential candidate Mitt Romney had set the stage with a speech in the morning in which he called the real estate mogul a fraud and said he posed a threat to democracy in America. Trump returned the insult calling Romney a “failed candidate” and said he (Romney) had begged him for an endorsement and would have gone down on his knees for it.
In the few moments of sane exchanges, Trump clarified that the US needed to stay in Afghanistan “for awhile”. But the reason he attributed to the position — to “protect” Pakistan’s nuclear weapons — was ambiguous. “I think you have to stay in Afghanistan for a while, because of the fact that you’re right next to Pakistan, which has nuclear weapons, and we have to protect that. Nuclear weapons change the game,” he said. He was always against intervention in Iraq, Trump said, but Afghanistan was different.
Trump conceded that he changed positions after he learned of more facts — such as his initial support for bringing in refugees from Syria (when the numbers were small) to his opposition to this later (when he realised the numbers were huge).
“I have a very strong core. But I’ve never seen a successful person who wasn’t flexible, who didn’t have a certain degree of flexibility,” he said when host Megyn Kelly asked about his flip-flops. Kelly also pointed out that senator Ted Cruz had proposed quintupling the number of foreign worker H-1B visas before reversing position after entering the presidential race. Cruz glossed over his about turn, but joined by Rubio, attacked Trump for employing foreign workers at a resort he ran in Florida.
Trump’s explanation: It’s very, very hard to get people. But other hotels do the exact same thing. This is a legal process. This is a procedure. It’s part of the law. I take advantage of that. There’s nothing wrong with it. Pretty much the same argument US and Indian IT companies make on the H-1B issue.