Republican Debate: Dec. 15, 2015

Ho Hum.  This time the potential candidates tried to outdo themselves and each other with warmongering and saber-rattling.  Ted Cruz wants to carpet-bomb in Syria and earlier said he wants to bomb ISIS "back to the Stone Age,"  an expression used by Curtis Lemay when he was George Wallace's running mate, referring to the Vietnam war.  Donald Trump went the furthest, saying he would target the families of terrorists, under the questionable theory that terrorists may not care about their own lives but do care about their families.  Everyone seems to have forgotten about Vietnam and even Iraq in their ideas about a Pax Americana.  Carly Fiorina wants to listen to the advice of the generals who have shown time and time again their inability to understand the wars we fight.  Of all the candidates only Rick Santorum was willing to make an attempt to understand ISIS and what it is doing.  I suspect that this is, to some extent, because his own theology is so conservative and misogynistic but he did at least make something of an attempt to put the situation into context, a context that goes back to the French and English imperialist division of the Middle East after World War I.

All the candidates want to return to a mythical time when the United States ran the world and vanquished all its enemies.  When Chris Christie mentioned the shutdown of the Los Angeles school system he talked about the safety of  all "the mothers taking their kids to school and all the fathers going off to work" as though this were still the 50's!  The candidates want to build up the military (though they all said they would not reinstitute the draft, probably because 18- year-olds vote now) and at the same time cut taxes and balance the budget; only Rand Paul pointed out the contradiction there.  Everyone wants to "secure the border" and only Rubio would consider a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, though he said that was far in the future after many other things were dealt with. The candidates seem to have made an agreement that when they mention how ineffective they think Obama is that his name should always be coupled with Hillary Clinton's, guilt by association. And each candidate had some sort of slogan they repeated, from Fiorina's "take America back" (it's unclear what that means) to Chris Christie's "I was a federal prosecutor," i.e., mine is bigger than yours.