The hardworking staff only caught bits and pieces of last night’s CNN Republican presidential bakeoff in South Carolina so . . . only bits and pieces:
• Between the candidate intros and the singing of the national anthem, CNN completed the transformation of presidential debates into sporting events.
• CNN moderator John King got totally mugged, yeah?
• Debate 101: Never lead with the most controversial issue. Let it hang, like the sword of Damocles, over the proceedings until they start to lag.
Then drop it.
• Newt Gingrich has his impersonation of “Newt Gingrinch” down pat, doesn’t he?
• Mitt Romney’s to-do list: Come up with better answers for Bain record, abortion record, Romneycare record.
Broken record.
• Big shoutout to Rick Santorum for defending intellectual property rights.
• John King Gets Mugged II: Bullied by audience into letting Ron Paul deliver a borderline-incoherent statement on abortion rights.
• GOP presidential candidates: We beg you, in the words of Rick Santorum, Stop It!
Campaign Outsider 
Newt’s opening reply to CNN’s John King — during which he accused most of the news media as being “destructive,” “vicious,” “negative” and “despicable” — was truly a thespian tour de force. Newt Gingrich nearly single-handedly wrote the script for nasty, negative, divisive politics as we know it today during his tenure in the House. Of course that was 15-20 years ago, so it’s not that surprising in this tech-induced world of the five-minute attention span. But a mere four nights earlier Gingrich lobbed the “food stamp President” epithet into the adoring crowd. The take away? Americans have a full-blown case of amnesia, as well as no sense of irony. And Newt? Give him the chutzpah award for now and all time.
Amen, Alan.
The topic of Gingrich’s ex-wife is fair game, but John King delivered a lousy question on the topic.
Better would have been: “Your ex-wife claims that you asked her for an open marriage. Are issues of a person’s marriage and intimate relationships fair game to ask a person who is running to be President of the United States?” When he says no, bring out one of a million quotations of him during the time he, as speaker, pushed for the impeachment of President Clinton over issues of his marriage and intimate relationship, and ask, “Are you being hypocritical by claiming then that a president could be impeached over such an issue, but that we can’t ask a presidential candidate?”
I vote for you to moderate the next debate, Mike.