It doesn't matter how hard you shake it, the big bag of fcks to give is completely empty now.

"Have you noticed that every one of these candidates says, 'Obama's weak. Putin's kicking sand in his face. When I talk to Putin, he's going to straighten out,'" Obama said, impersonating a refrain among Republican candidates that he's allowed Russian President Vladimir Putin too much leeway. "Then it turns out they can't handle a bunch of CNBC moderators at the debate. Let me tell you, if you can't handle those guys, then I don't think the Chinese and the Russians are going to be too worried about you," Obama said.

I'm telling you. Wait until the general election, and he doesn't even have to worry about "taking sides" in a Democratic primary campaign, and his only concern will be making sure that his legacy as president is not put at risk by the election of one of the passengers in the clown car. He's going to end up handing out whoopee cushions and dribble glasses at Republican gatherings.

The president has a major point, of course. The squabble on the Republican side in the wake of the CNBC debate debacle has demonstrated that, even if it still existed, which I don't believe that it does, the institutional Republican party is nothing more than a place where various independently financed buffoons, grifters, and mountebanks—and the people who sublet them—can go to get out of the rain. First, there was the mutiny against the leftist tyranny of the financial press. Then, there was the mutiny against the mutiny, led by the Libidinous Visitor. (And I continue to be unnerved by the fact that Donald Trump is, at the moment, making more sense than all the rest of them combined, at least on this fauxtrage.) Given their performance to this point, I wouldn't trust any of these people to park my car, let alone decide when and where the country should make the next war.

The president has seen the cleansing and clarifying power of ridicule, and good for him. He has given himself over to the liberating power of le Snark. (This revelation also seems to have come upon Megyn Kelly, although I suppose it won't last with her.) There really isn't anything left to do concerning the preposterous position that the GOP has managed to place itself at the moment. The entire Republican presidential field has come loose from reality and is floating free within the bubble, far above us lesser mortals, existing on its own recycled intellectual waste products, a self-generating universe of illusion in perpetual motion. And Dr. Ben (The Blade) Carson, who is a nut in thrall to other nuts, living and dead, just took the lead in at least one national poll.

The president is surely trolling them. He's daring one or all of them to come back at him so he can laugh even more loudly and crack even more wisely. (And Aqua Buddha's attempt to shoot the dozens with Larry Wilmore doesn't exactly fill me with confidence in their ability to trade punches with the president.) But, truly, what is there to do but laugh? They can't even agree on the temperature of the room in which they will refuse to debate. He's their president, too, whether they want to accept it or not. He gets to do what he wants.

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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