(Mandatory Video Accompaniment To This Post)

"Fair is foul and foul is fair" (Macbeth: I;1)

"The world's gone mad today/and good's bad today." (Cole Porter, Anything Goes)

"Wrong is considered right and right is considered wrong." (Marco Rubio, Closing Statement, 2016)

Well, there it was, on a stage in South Carolina, the prion disease that has been afflicting the Republican party since Ronald Reagan first fed it the monkeybrains almost 40 years ago broke out into the general population. During the ninth debate of the Republican candidates for president, we saw actual facts booed (by my count) three times before the first commercial break. We saw two sons of Cuban emigres duke it out over who can make the lives of Hispanic immigrants more miserable. We saw a vulgar talking yam dare to tell the truth about C-Plus Augustus while standing next to his brother, and we later saw the vulgar talking yam call Ted Cruz the biggest liar he's ever seen. And still, after it was over, serious people got on the electric teevee machine to talk about who had the best night, and who won and who lost, and not one of them mentioned the obvious fact that one of our two major political parties suffered a complete mental meltdown on national television. The big winner was either Bernie Sanders or Hillary Rodham Clinton. The big loser was participatory democracy all the way back through history to Pericles. No wonder Ben Carson kept nodding off into the Western Isles. He was safer there.

Tell me truly—how does that spectacle not destroy the credibility of the Republican Party for at least a decade?

How does that freak show not blow up the party's claim to have serious policies to help govern the country? How does that carnival of unimaginative invective add up to a governing philosophy? How does that massive, chewy clusterfck add up to a single rational moment of human thought? I don't care if these guys believe in evolution or not, but they at least should try to demonstrate while they're on TV that, somehow, we've come a respectable distance as a species since we tottered out of Olduvai Gorge. I've seen better organized riots. I've heard more coherent dialogue from cats mating in an alley. I once heard a squirrel being eaten by a coyote. The squirrel had better manners while it was being devoured, and was better spoken besides. Christ above, somebody separate these clowns before they hurt their brains some more. Tailgunner Ted Cruz said more than he knows, not least because he doesn't know what "literally" means.

Our country literally hangs in the balance.

And one of these guys is the person to tip the balance?

TRUMP: ... We're supporting troops

BUSH: ... Let me finish....

TRUMP: ...that we don't even know who they are.

DICKERSON: ... OK, settle...

BUSH: ...This is ridiculous...

TRUMP: ... We're supporting troops that we don't even know who they are...

DICKERSON: ... Alright, Mr. Trump, alright...

TRUMP: We have no idea who they are.

DICKERSON: Gentlemen, I think we're going to leave that there. I've got a question for Senator...

BUSH: ... This is coming from a guy who gets his foreign policy from the shows.

TRUMP: ... Oh, yeah, yeah...

BUSH: ... This is a guy who thinks that Hillary Clinton is a great negotiator in Iran...

TRUMP: ... Let 44 million in New Hampshire, it was practically (INAUDIBLE)...

BUSH: ... This is a man who insults his way to the nomination...

TRUMP: ... 44 million—give me a break.

Or, perhaps, it will be one of these two guys.

CRUZ: You know, the lines are very, very clear. Marco right now supports citizenship for 12 million people here illegally. I oppose citizenship. Marco stood on the debate stage and said that. But I would note not only that, Marco has a long record when it comes to amnesty. In the state of Florida, as speaker of the house, he supported in-state tuition for illegal immigrants. In addition to that, Marco went on Univision in Spanish and said he would not rescind President Obama's illegal executive amnesty on his first day in office. I have promised to rescind every single illegal executive action, including that one.

(MIX OF APPLAUSE AND BOOING)

CRUZ: And on the question...

(CROSSTALK)

RUBIO: Well, first of all, I don't know how he knows what I said on Univision because he doesn't speak Spanish. And second of all, the other point that I would make...

CRUZ: (SPEAKING SPANISH).

Or perhaps this kindly gentleman here.

CARSON: No, it isn't. First of all, let me go back to your first question for me. It wasn't phrased as who gets to nominate Supreme Court appointees, of course that's the president. So I know that there are some left wing media who would try to make hay on that. Secondly, thank you for including me in the debate. Two questions already. This is great.

Later, Doctor Ben used his closing statement to repeat an alleged quote from Josef Stalin that, as near as anybody can tell, was nothing more than an Internet fiction. By then, I felt like one of those people who used to poke sticks at the inmates of Bedlam. This stopped being a guilty pleasure.

BUSH: He has had the gall to go after my mother. Hold on. Let me finish. He has had the gall to go after my mother.

TRUMP: That's not keeping us safe.

BUSH: Look, I won the lottery when I was born 63 years ago, looked up, and I saw my mom. My mom is the strongest woman I know.

TRUMP: She should be running.

Yo mama, Jeb (!).

Beautiful. Just fcking beautiful.

God, it was great television, though. They should have held the damn thing in an octagon. Even Twitter gave up after a while. I'm fairly willing to bet something substantial that poor John Dickerson didn't bargain for this when he sat down in the chair once occupied by former Hohenzollern defense correspondent Bob Schieffer. Somebody buy that man a drink. The Republican party has gone completely barking mad.

It was sadly fascinating to watch most of the commentary on television in the wake of this rockfight. The English language was torn to shreds in the attempts by the folks on the electric teevee machine to avoid the obvious reality that was lying there bleeding out from every orifice right in front of them.

There was nobody who did well. This was a debate in which obvious fact—George W. Bush was president on September 11, 2001—was booed from the cheap seats and derided from the other people on stage. This was a debate in which Donald J. Trump was on the side of empirical reality, so much the worse for empirical reality. This was a debate in which Young Marco Rubio promised to expand the Republican party by destroying marriage equality and forcing a young woman to carry her rapist's baby to term. Trump (and empirical reality) got heckled. Rubio got cheered. Wildly. Nobody commented on the obvious disconnect from physical reality.

One of these guys has to win the Republican nomination. That's the reason why the process through which they have to haul themselves, and the fact that their party has lost its mind, matters. That's why ignoring the spectacle of what actually happened on Saturday night is a disservice to journalism and to the country. It's not Trump, boys.

It's the rest of y'all.

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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