"There's one thing I'll tell you about my brother," said Jeb (!) Bush. "He kept us safe."

And everybody cheered.

I ran out of patience long ago with The Great Mulligan. C-Plus Augustus ignored the terrorist threat for nine months. He told his Attorney General to shift focus from counterterrorism to weed and porn. He told his National Security Advisor to worry about the Russians. He blew off a Presidential Daily Briefing and a CIA briefer. Then, on September 11, 2001, there were 3000 Americans who were not kept safe on his watch. He then stonewalled any real investigation of his negligence. He then launched a war of choice after allowing the architect of the attacks to go free. There were more than 4000 American soldiers who were not kept safe. And now his blithering brother suggests that time began on September 12, 2001. Scott Walker then chimed in about how it was all Barack Obama's fault. Then there was Mike Huckabee, stressing the importance of "good intelligence" on formulating foreign policy. This would have been a good idea in, say, 2003, when Jeb(!)'s brother was cooking the books to start his pet war. But everybody cheered. Nobody called them on this. Nobody, except Rand Paul, had second thoughts on sending more American troops back into Iraq. But Donald Trump, whose combat experience is limited to punching out a music teacher in prep school, said that he thought the president lacked courage. I wouldn't hire any of these guys as a crossing guard.

There was a long closing colloquy about the Supreme Court in which Ted Cruz wished that liberal squish John Roberts never had been raised to the court, wishing instead that we were dealing with Edith Jones, who is a nut hankering to bring us back to the Lochner economy, and Michael Luttig, an interesting chap who resigned from the Fourth Circuit under circumstances best described as curious, but having a lot to do with how C-Plus Augustus helped keep us safe, except when he wasn't doing that.

Late in the game, Jake Tapper threw out a quote from George Schultz—Secret memos! Last Minute Pardons!—about how Saint Reagan approached climate change. "Because we are not going to destroy our economy the way the left wants to do," replied Marco Rubio. "You can measure the climate. You can measure it. I am skeptical of the remedies the Left wants to enact."

"This is an issue where, in my state, is thousands of manufacturing jobs, put people at risk for something its own EPA considers marginal," Scott Walker burbled, startling those of us watching who didn't think there were thousands of manufacturing jobs left in Wisconsin. Ted Cruz futilely hollered that, if Tapper wanted to hear from a real denialist, he should call on Cruz. Am I wrong to wish that some of those northern California wildfires began edging toward Simi Valley at right about this time?

And Huck wants an Apollo program to find cures for diabetes, cancer, heart disease and Alzheimer's. Much of the research into said cures at the moment relies on, you know, fetal tissue experimentation. This goes sailing by everyone in the audience, most of whom seem to be ice sculptures at this point. Jeb (!) wants to put Margaret Thatcher on the $10 bill. I think he'd given up and started drinking mojitos with both hands during the break. Kasich wanted Mother Teresa, who was Albanian. But I am not going to comment on the concluding That's So Reagan question, although I think the whole event would have been livened up had that airplane started to taxi out of the hall.

I have to admit I found Chris Christie's one-man performance—Gateway Drug!—of Reefer Madness, also starring Carly Fiorina, mildly diverting, and I was struck by how proud Ted Cruz was to have thwarted even limited gun-control laws in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre. Which seemed of a piece with Bush's invocation of The Great Mulligan, which is about where the whole debate left the earthly plane and ascended to the rarefied air of the top of the conservative information bubble. You have to forget a considerable amount of history to maintain belief in The Great Mulligan. In both cases, in lower Manhattan and in Newtown, it helps to be completely deaf to the cries of the dead. That's takes a special kind of person. It truly does.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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