Last night was literally the first debate I’ve watched since George Bush and John Kerry faced off in 2004. I don’t find them to be terribly enlightening. I find the carefully scripted impromptu zingers to be trite and banal. I don’t think slinging slogans and reciting talking points makes anyone any smarter. And the moderation of the debates by abject and obvious partisans is simply disgusting.

But, since RedState hosted a liveblog (please pay it a visit to see our real time observations) of the last Democrat debate before the Iowa Caucuses, I was forced to sit through the entire thing and attempt to pay attention and make some sense of it. Here’s how I see it.

There Was Some Very Weird Eyebrow Action

Amy Klobuchar’s eyebrows acted like they were living creatures writhing on her forehead (fortunately, they stayed attached). The movements must have been sensual because at one point one of Pete Buttigieg’s eyebrows started acting like it wanted to make a throuple of it.

Elizabeth Warren Is CNN’s Favorite

I don’t know that that means very much other than CNN carrying on the Donna Brazile tradition of picking a favorite Democrat to prop up, probably in hope of better access. These were my colleague, Bochie’s, observations.

https://twitter.com/bonchieredstate/status/1217293251830521857

https://twitter.com/bonchieredstate/status/1217282839680618497

https://twitter.com/bonchieredstate/status/1217281259518550016

To me the implication was that they are clearly afraid that Sanders could win the nomination and they were willing to cut

Tom Steyer Is an Idiot

Last night Tom Steyer was on the podium. He proved exactly two things. First, if you spend enough money you can break the polling threshold to qualify for a Democrat debate. Second, just because you’ve made a crap-ton of money doesn’t mean that you really aren’t a high-functioning imbecile. Steyer was obviously unfamiliar with every topic discussed. Worse that unfamiliar, he acted as though he’d not even bothered preparing. His answer to everything seemed to be to a) grab an idea that had already been tossed out by another candidate, and b) claim he could do it better/faster/cheaper because of his experience.

Elizabeth Warren Is an Obvious Fraud

There is little about Warren that I don’t find smarmy, grotesque, or both. How often in her life do you really think she has ever used the phrase ‘Mommies and Daddies?’ She tries to play this folksy, wise old country woman schtick but it is just insulting to anyone who has to listen to her. It is pretty obvious that Warren lied about Bernie Sanders saying that a woman couldn’t be elected president. Hillary Clinton just proved that an incompetent and criminal woman can’t be elected, but even she managed more of the popular vote than President Trump. Absolutely no one else has ever heard Sanders say anything like that, others, like Tulsi Gabbard, say Sanders encouraged them to run.

CNN Helps Warren Keep Sanders Smear Alive Even After He Flatly Denies It https://t.co/TO2OOMoAPy

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) January 15, 2020

Plus, Sanders is not a liar. He may be an unrepentant old Stalinist, but he makes no attempt to sugar-coat any of his policy positions. Warren, on the other hand, is a liar. She’s lied about her father’s occupation. She’s lied about getting fired for being pregnant. She’s lied about sending her kids to public school. She lied and cheated to advance her academic career by concocting a bullsh** story about her Indian heritage. Warren is the kind of person who will lie to you about what they had for breakfast just to stay in practice. That CNN took her claim at face value was an affront to decency and points back to my first item.

Biden Is Not a Viable Candidate

No one has ever accused Biden of being smart but last night highlighted just how bad he is. There is literally no policy debate since the founding of the Republic where Biden will not claim for himself a central role. His bluster about his tough guy positions is a joke. He obviously can’t separate talking about something in the Senate from actually accomplishing something. The hilarious moment was him going after Trump for attacking “my only living son.” That would be the middle-aged coke-head grifter who was thrown out of the Navy Reserve for drug abuse, deserted his family, spent so much money on hookers and blow that the family couldn’t pay its bills, shacked up with his widowed sister-in-law, who he subsequently abandoned to marry an acquaintance of just a few days after impregnating a stripper who he let use “sex toys” on him. Also, Biden never mentioned his new grandchild.

The Democrats Really Believe That Universal Healthcare Is a Winner

You had two flavors last night. Medicare For All, and Obamacare With A Vengeance. These people clearly intend to make ‘universal healthcare is a human right’ a central campaign issue. The only saving grace is that the plans are bullsh** and based on numbers that are composed of the same substance. The idea that by eliminating administrative costs can reduce the cost of Medicare is simply laughable. Buttigieg got a question about how eliminating the private health insurance industry would be handled and he said that the government would pay salaries for those people for five years until they learn to code or something. Warren claims that by catching “tax cheats” she can pay for her bill. Buttigieg claims he can do Mediare For All for $150 billion/year. Biden sounded sane by wanting a more expansive Obamacare.

Their Foreign Policy Proposals in a Single Word

#OrangeManBad. That’s it. No one would agree to using military force in the face of an imminent attack. They all thought Iran was a terrorist nation they all thought we should negotiate with them. One of them had just said “you never negotiate with terrorists.” Biden seemed intent on resurrecting the so-called Powell Doctrine (apparently he was not actually Obama’s vice president). All of them wanted major Congressional involvement before any use of force. None seemed to recall that Obama used the 2002 AUMF to bomb Libya and set off a regional war complete with genocide and ethnic cleansing in Syria. Oh, and Tom Steyer has traveled a lot and met lot so folks.

They Want Your Kids

They want government funded–the way it was couched implied to me that they meant mandatory–daycare, pre-K, and after-school programs. All I could think of was that Bernie Sanders’s field organizer who was caught in a James O’Keefe sting yesterday was not joking about using schools for indoctrinating kids.

The Watermelon Debate

A watermelon, as you know, is green on the outside and red on the inside. That is exactly what we saw last night. While these people were pushing every possible cockamamie environmental scheme, the real message was that they were perfectly willing to use totalitarian state tactics to achieve the end.

Don’t fool yourself. AOC’s Green New Deal is not fringe, it will be a plank in the Democrat platform. All the candidates were touting the nation being free of carbon fuels by 2050. There really didn’t seem to be any environmental will-o-the-wisp that they did not embrace. Combatting climate change will be a driving force in any administration headed by one of these candidates.

Trump is Right

Last night, Steyer claimed, without evidence, that at a rally in Florida, President Trump had claimed that if Democrats won the White House that they would destroy the economy ” in 15 minutes.” I don’t know if Trump said that, and can’t find any evidence that he did, but if he did, he was right. The combination of universal health care, a hostility towards business, a belief that the government needs your money more than you do, and the environmental lunacy would definitely wreck the economy. The upside, Twitter go to troll Steyer:

I agree with him on this, 100%. But why would anyone vote Democrat? We are setting all time records with the economy! https://t.co/trTemE8iUz

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 15, 2020

Bottom Line

take home notes:
-I'm no Sanders fan, but CNN totally knifed him, again.
-the real thinkers were missing on that stage
-the moderators were amateurs
-the candidates were bored by their own words
-trump will eat any of these alive.

— GregGutfeld (@greggutfeld) January 15, 2020

These people are radical. They are anti-American. They are dangerous. The upside is that their positions are undisguised extremism and the candidates aren’t particularly competent.

VAN JONES: “There was nothing I saw tonight that would be able to take Donald Trump out.” pic.twitter.com/dNf91lOLsA

— ALX 🇺🇸 (@alx) January 15, 2020