"The questions that have been asked so far in this debate illustrate why the American people don’t trust the media," Senator Ted Cruz said last night, drawing himself up in a way that made him appear to slightly inflate. Sweeping his arm across the stage, at the University of Colorado, in Boulder, he said, "This is not a cage match. And, you look at the questions: 'Donald Trump, are you a comic-book villain?' 'Ben Carson, can you do math?' 'John Kasich, will you insult two people over here?' 'Marco Rubio, why don’t you resign?' 'Jeb Bush, why have your numbers fallen?' How about talking about the substantive issues the people care about?" He got a big round of applause, which Carlos Quintanilla, one of the moderators for CNBC, tried to interrupt, asking, "Do we get credit...," before Cruz interrupted him again.

"The contrast with the Democratic debate, where every fawning question from the media was 'Which of you is more handsome and why?' ” Cruz said. That wasn’t quite how anyone who saw that debate would remember it, but the Senator just shook his head, compared the Democrats to "the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks," and wondered at the implausibility of a debate moderator voting in a Republican primary. Quintanilla tried again to be heard over the laughter of the crowd before he managed to say, somewhat forlornly, "I asked you about the debt limit and I got no answer."

For the record, this was the question that inspired Cruz’s rant about insubstantiality: "Congressional Republicans, Democrats, and the White House are about to strike a compromise that would raise the debt limit, prevent a government shutdown and calm financial markets that fear of—another Washington-created crisis is on the way. Does your opposition to it show that you’re not the kind of problem-solver American voters want?" Given that Cruz's previous responses to such crises have included filibustering the Senate with a reading of "Green Eggs and Ham," and that he has, in just the past month, been involved in a squabble with his fellow-Republicans over his efforts to make the debt ceiling a hostage in the fight against Planned Parenthood, it was a pretty good question, which Cruz blithely ignored. And yet, in the brief tussle that followed, Cruz managed to make it sound as if he were being unjustly denied a chance to turn to the debt ceiling as the questioning moved on to the next candidate**.**

Even before the debate ended, CNBC was being roundly criticized—Reince Priebus, the head of the Republican National Committee, tweeted that CNBC “should be ashamed of how this debate was handled”—and, to be clear, the moderators did fail. But not for the reasons that the Republican candidates gave: Rubio said that "the Democrats have the ultimate Super PAC. It’s called the mainstream media”; Carson called a question “propaganda”; Chris Christie complained that he wasn’t being asked about ISIS, even though this was a debate about business and the economy. Nor was it because their questions were especially marked by infotainment froth. It is because the moderators utterly failed to control a group of candidates whose level of detachment from facts and vitriol seemed to surprise them when it shouldn't have.

It’s unclear what anyone’s best-case scenario for this debate would have been, in terms of real engagement with the issues. The shallowness of much of the rhetoric in the campaign can lead to simple questions that, to some ears, sound simplistic, but have to be asked, such as why the math in Carson's very vague budget proposals doesn't add up, or why, as another moderator, John Harwood, asked Donald Trump, his talk about forcing Mexico to build a wall "and make Americans better off because your greatness would replace the stupidity and incompetence of others" (Trump: "That's right") didn't amount to "a comic-book version of a Presidential campaign." The moderators just didn't account for the pits of deep ugliness in those shallows and didn't know how to navigate them. They weren't prepared for candidates who called them liars, and who, by the end, were simply ignoring both questions and time limits. Carly Fiorina, notably, just started talking when she wanted; at the very end, she had a brief blinking contest with Harwood, who surrendered with a weary "All right, go ahead." Again, by this point in the campaign, the moderators really should have known better.

For example, when Becky Quick asked Trump why he'd been critical of Mark Zuckerberg's call for more H1B visas for tech workers, and Trump denied that he had been, she seemed surprised, saying, "Where did I read this and come up with this that you were?"—as if he would tell her. "I don’t know—you people write the stuff," Trump said. A minute later, when Quick tried to follow up by noting that Trump had called Marco Rubio "Mark Zuckerberg’s personal Senator because he was in favor of the H1B," Trump replied, "I never said that. I never said that."

"So this was an erroneous article the whole way around?" Quick said. "My apologies. I'm sorry." It took until after a commercial break for her to discover that the quotes had come from Trump's own Web site. He didn't apologize, and it didn’t matter. Cruz had set a model for his colleagues that night: people hate reporters. Just insult them and you'll be fine, regardless of the question you've been asked. It was similar to a moment Newt Gingrich had, during a debate in 2012, when he gained momentum by telling off John King, of CNN. But that was a rejection of questions about Gingrich's personal life ("despicable" questions, Gingrich said) and not of fact-based queries altogether.

There were some bad and petty questions. Quick pressed too much and with too much alarm about Rubio, the father of four school-age children, taking money out of his retirement savings, at a cost to him and his family of thousands of dollars. It's more Suze Orman's job to berate people about things like that, and what Rubio did is neither unethical nor disqualifying. Then again, it allowed him to play to his strengths, saying, "Here’s the truth. I didn’t inherit any money. My dad was a bartender, my mother was a maid." He said that after getting married he had to explain to his wife "why someone named Sallie Mae was taking a thousand dollars out of our bank account every month." Rubio did well all around (my colleague John Cassidy writes about why he was the big winner), including when Jeb Bush tried, with an ill-conceived feint, to cut him down.

The issue was Rubio's frequent absence from the Senate—the occasion for another of the questions Cruz objected to, based on a call in an editorial in Florida's Sun-Sentinel for Rubio to resign. Rubio had already dealt with the question, inevitably, by attacking the press: "It’s actually evidence of the bias that exists in the American media today," he said of the editorial. Bush asked if he could jump in, "because I’m a constituent of the senator and I helped him and I expected that he would do constituent service, which means that he shows up to work." Whoever told Bush, who so often in his life has been given well-paid opportunities through family or political connections, that he should put Rubio in his place by calling him an employee who had failed to provide good "service" is not advising him very well. When Rubio asked why Bush didn't mind that Senator John McCain, whom he'd cited as a model, had missed a lot of votes, Bush underscored the patron play by saying, "He wasn't my senator."

"Someone has convinced you that attacking me is going to help you," Rubio said. And maybe it would have, if Bush had any aptitude for this sort of thing. But he lost the stage, having demonstrated only the sort of petulance that he showed last weekend, when he complained that there were a lot of "really cool things" that he could be doing besides running for President. His only memorable moment came when he bragged about how well his fantasy-football team was doing—“Gronkowski is still going strong!”—better, it seems, than his fantasy Presidential campaign.

The Republicans might have liked a “successful” debate even less. Trump's campaign had fought with CNBC to make sure that the debate wouldn't go too long and that there would be closing statements, and Trump used that time to say that he had fought CNBC and won: "In about two minutes, I renegotiated it so we can get the hell out of here." But, once we do go out, where do we go?