Fundraiser Day Four: And Trump Looked Upon His Creation

And, behold, it was very yooooge.

And the evening and the morning were full of mad men and dead men spinning, spinning, spinning.

CNBC’s really bad debate night

By Aaron Blake October 28 at 11:00 PM

Before the candidates even took the stage at Wednesday night's Republican presidential debate, the network hosting the debate was getting pilloried on social media.

As the 8 o'clock Eastern start time came and went, CNBC's pre-debate pundits kept droning on. And on. And on. It wasn't clear why. There was no countdown clock on the screen or indication of when the show might begin.

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Once things got going, it didn't get much better. The candidates took turns ragging on the moderators for their questions and quibbled with their premises and facts. Sometimes, we would note, this was without good reason to, as when Donald Trump said he hadn't called Marco Rubio Mark Zuckerberg's "personal senator." He had. On his Web site. And going after the mainstream media is a tried-and-true GOP applause line that most candidates employed at one point or another.

But when Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) took an entire 60 seconds he had to denounce the debate moderators, he found some unlikely allies. Including the aforementioned Patton Oswalt and left-leaning comedian Bill Maher.

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The wingnuts behind the lecterns delighted the wingnuts in the audience by doing what wingnuts always do when cornered: Gish galloping their lies, bum-rushing the moderators and declaring war on the Commie Liberal Media who has destroyed all that is great and true about God's Chosen Nation.  Now since this has been the basic battle formation of all cornered Republicans since the days of Senator Richard Nixon the Commie Hunter, this just further confirms the sad fact that the Beltway media really does live in a happy, clappy Both Siderist Shangri-La where the rough winds of Reality never muss their hair or flutter their notes:

The moderators just didn’t account for the pits of deep ugliness in those shallows and didn’t know how to navigate them. They weren’t prepared for candidates who called them liars, and who, by the end, were simply ignoring both questions and time limits. Carly Fiorina, notably, just started talking when she wanted; at the very end, she had a brief blinking contest with Harwood, who surrendered with a weary “All right, go ahead.” Again, by this point in the campaign, the moderators really should have known better.

And floating above it all, effortlessly maintaining his share of the crazy-pie and coming across as the calmest and most reasonable clown at the circus, was Donald Trump.

Meanwhile, Jeb! is having a tough morning:

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