MANCHESTER, N.H — At this moment, I am still digesting the incredible farrago of gibbering nonsense, vengeful religious rage, political chickenshit, and Mandarin Chinese that combined to make the 45,670th of 62,390 scheduled Republican presidential debates the Level 4 biohazard that it was. Instead, I'm going to talk about signs for a while.

There is no question that, on the highways and byways of New Hampshire, Ron Paul has won convincingly the critical Overpass Primary. On Route 93, all the way from the Massachusetts border to a little north of the lake country (which is as far as I went, lest I be tempted to say, "Oh, fk this whole parade," and keep going until I found a nice trapper's cabin in the wilderness of Quebec), there wasn't a single overpass above the highway that didn't have a banner saying, "RON PAUL — PEACE" or "RON PAUL — PROSPERITY" or some such other inspirational — if dangerously distracting — epigram. Paul also edged Willard Romney in the less critical Signs In The Woods primary. Willard had some of his out there, but they were just your basic lawn signs, guaranteed to blow over in the mildest breeze. Paul's were deeper in the forest, and they were generally made of wood and were hand-painted. (It is entirely possible that, come Wednesday, these signs once again will resume their primary jobs as back doors or kitchen tables.) Some of these were also found rising from pastures. That's what I call field organizing: organizing your signs in actual fields.

Okay. I'm ready now.

In brief, Saturday night may have been the most naked piece of point-shaving and game-throwing since the 1919 World Series. I've seen fixed prizefights where the issue was more in doubt. The other candidates went so far into the tank for Willard that they may not dry off until next August. In the 1950's, Frankie Carbo would have had them all killed because they made it look so damned obvious. Where was the promised Gingrich assault on the frontrunner? Where was the blood, the guts, the glory? Where was the damn slasher film we all anticipated? This was a waltz, and a clumsy one. If the people in that audience had any pride at all, they'd have attacked the ABC platform and demanded satisfaction for this massive piece of consumer fraud.

The coalescing has begun. The non-Romneys seem to be coming to grips with the fact that there's virtually no chance that Willard isn't the nominee. So, by and large, the rest of them started paying court staying away from him. This had two major consequences:

1) Willard was able to get away with being even more banal than he usually is, except for that one moment when George Stephanopoulos tried to get him to give a straight answer on the right to privacy as derived from the 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut decision in reference to contraception. "I don't know any state that wants to ban contraception, George," said Willard, running through all four of the expressions of which his face is capable, beginning with "Lordly Disdain" and ending with "Flog The Butler." Stephanopoulos pressed on. (At one point, I thought he might throw a packet of Trojans at Willard and say, "These, motherfucker!") Romney ducked, weaved, made his face work harder than he was, until he finally cried, "Hey, contraception works!"

Not exactly Webster's Reply To Hayne, true. But not banal.

And:

2) Because they declined to be dicks to Willard, because they're all going to spend most of next autumn getting sockless, drunk, and standing behind him on a stage, pretending they don't want to hit him with their shoes, the rest of the cast decided to be dicks toward each other, toward the president, and toward large numbers of their fellow countrymen and countrywomen. Ron Paul called Newt Gingrich a chickenhawk, and Newt responded by saying that he'd never asked for his deferment, which he received because he was married at the time to the first of his future ex-wives. Paul came back at him. "When I was called, I was married and had two kids. I went." Dr. Paul has a dickish side to him that has been heretofore covert. Not anymore.

Newt rallied his well-wrought dickness, though, right after a lengthy wrangle over gay marriage that might have been the most pointless discussion of that particular controversial issue ever conducted, by attacking the "liberal news media" for paying so much attention to discrimination under the law aimed at gay people, and none at all to the fact that Catholic organizations have been forbidden from arranging adoptions and performing other social services because they choose to practice discrimination based on religion. "There's anti-Christian bigotry and none of it gets covered," thundered Gingrich, who earlier in the discussion said that being nice to gay couples (Hey, you can visit your partner when he's dying. Is this a great country or what?) didn't mean adjusting the sacrament of marriage. It apparently has eluded his Holiness, Pope N. Leroy I, that not only is secular marriage not a sacrament, but also that a lot of Protestant denominations don't believe it is, either.

(The trademark Gingrichian sneer was mostly leveled at President Obama, who, Gingrich said, "in his desperate attempt to create a radical socialist European model is undoubtedly sincere." Ooooh, snap! Look upon my adjectives, ye mighty, and despair!)

His Holiness was joined in this newest Crusade by that emptiest of suits, Governor Goodhair Perry, who babbled about the administration's "war on religion" while citing... well, who the Christ cares what he cited? He isn't even competing in New Hampshire, but he took time to fly all the way up here to continue to be the biggest bindlestiff who ever stood behind a podium, probably just to get his mug on television. That is Rick Perry today in New Hampshire: the guy without the shirt who runs onto the field in the seventh inning.

However, leading the pack to the surprise of nobody was Rick Santorum, who may well be the dickiest dick who ever ran for high office in this great land. His dickitude is vast. It contains multitudes. His dickosity will be studied by scholars for as long as there are scholars willing to plow through the highest and most arcane levels of the dickocrypha. Jesus Mary, have I mentioned what a dick this guy is?

Somebody hit him for being on the 2006 list of the most corrupt members of Congress put together by the watchdog group Citizens For Responsibility And Ethics In Washington (CREW). This was Santorum's reply:

"Anybody who hasn't been sued by CREW isn't a conservative."

(Sorry. The list you were on included four Democrats including William Jefferson, who went to the slam, and Maxine Waters, who is many things, but is not a conservative. Dick.)

But Santorum didn't reach his true dickotheosis until he decided to take on Willard Romney for using the phrase "middle class."

"Governor Romney uses a term I shy away from," Santorum said. "'Middle-class.' There are no "classes" in America. Middle-income, maybe. But we don't put people into 'classes.' We don't get into class warfare. That's their job."

I am telling you this as a true fact: I have never heard a politician say anything that stupid before in 30 years of watching politicians talk in public. I realize that talking about class in this country rather puts the lie to all that American Dream malarkey that raises all that money for y'all, and that Joe McCarthy made talking about class downright dangerous in the 1950's but, Jesus H. Christ on a package tour of the Balkans, when did using the word "class" become a liberal plot? When did it become... wait for it... politically incorrect? But it was the self-righteous fervor, the glistening brow and flashing eyes, with which Santorum delivered himself of this barking idiocy that made the sheer stupidity of it pale in comparison to the proud dickishness with which it was proclaimed.

There are no classes in America?

At a time when income disparity is at its greatest level since God knows when? At a time when real wages have been stalled since half-past Reagan? At a time in which the richest 10 percent of the country controls two-thirds of our net worth? At the conclusion of three decades in which the change in income among American families has tilted so far toward the richest one-percent that the chart looks like fking K2?

There are no classes in America?

Dick.

All that was left was Jon Huntsman's big moment, when he accused Willard (again) of fomenting a trade war with China and, when Willard denied it, Huntsman said something to him in Mandarin that supposedly meant, "You just don't get it."

How useless an exercise was this whole thing? The toughest thing anyone said to the frontrunner was in Chinese. Then Willard got a chance to be a dick by summoning up his gift for patronizing sarcasm. "There it is," smirked Willard. "He wins!"

At the very end, just as I was beginning to wonder if the end would ever come, they were asked what would they be doing on Saturday night if they weren't on that stage. (Ooh, ooh! Ask me! Ask me!) Gingrich started off by saying he'd be home "watching the national-championship college basketball game." He meant the football game, and he caught himself, sort of, so we'll give him a pass. Then two of his compadres — including Willard — agreed with him. Yeah, they'd be watching that national-championship game, you betcha, boy howdy.

The BCS championship game takes place Monday night. Three members of the Republican presidential field told America last night that, if they weren't in New Hampshire being dicks to themselves and the rest of the nation, they'd be home watching a football game that wouldn't be played for nearly another 48 hours. That cabin sounded mighty good by then. Bienvenue, Quebec!

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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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