Blogging Somebody Else's Debateblogging

I didn't watch a second of the Republican debate tonight, but no matter because Andrew Sullivan watched it for me. The take-away I get is that Ron Paul thinks beyond the immediate moment and is therefore unacceptable to conservatives. Also apparently Tom Tancredo wants Jack Bauer to be his running mate, although Bauer probably has more dimensionality despite being a fictional character. Mitt Romney called for doubling the size of Guantanamo, and Rudy Giuliani got to pull his 9-11 card out by attacking Ron Paul for daring to suggest the concept of blowback which is well-known to anyone whose sense of history doesn't perish the past with each passing day.

But I can hardly believe that the same person wrote this:

The Republicans, we learned, have absolutely no idea what to do about Iraq. The only two people with coherent positions were McCain and Paul. McCain supports a war without end, a permanent occupation of Iraq, regardless of whether a national government there can exist in the foreseeable future. He's for empire, as are Cheney and Bush. I can see no reason for him to withdraw any troops in the next five years. The notion that a national Iraqi government, composed of Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds, will be able to defend itself and take the side of the West in the war in Jihadist terror is simply ludicrous in the imaginable future. That much we surely know by now. So empire is the new Republican consensus: an empire built entirely for security reasons, and an empire which somehow manages to make us less secure.

And then this:

For me, then, the debate winnowed the field of candidates down to two: McCain and Paul. That was quick.

The guy supports permanent empire around the world, a position Sullivan mocks relentlessly, and then he's the last man standing? Huhh-what? I understand that the winnowing comes from the fact that McCain and Paul are the only two who don't support torture (at least rhetorically). But it's like the guy who wrote paragraph 6 never met the guy who wrote paragraph 1.

I still say "none of the above" is out to a huge lead.