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Monday night was Debate Night in America. It needed a Carrie Underwood intro with a bunch of fireworks and some unintelligible lyrics and Tim Ryan, flexing on some Ohio high school football field. It was a festival session on CSPAN. I had two screens going at once, and very soon I will hasten to the Life Store to see what they have in the remainder bin.
We had the U.S. Senate races in Ohio and Utah and the Iowa and Georgia gubernatorial contests. Even without the spectral presence of Herschel Walker on the evening’s card, the events gave us some very pleasant and revelatory moments of Republican conservative madness, on which their Democratic opponents were more than happy to hang pink neon signs reading, “I’m with stupid.”
For example, out at Utah Valley State, Mike Lee, the famous konztitooshunal skolar and incumbent senator, was outraged that his opponent Evan McMullin brought up Lee’s insurrection-adjacent behavior during the days leading up to the January 6 riots. McMullin told Lee, "For you to talk about the importance of the Electoral College is rich. You know exactly how important it is, and I think you knew how important it was when you sought to urge the White House that had lost an election to find fake electors to overturn the will of the people[...]Senator Lee, you said the president should listen to legal quack Sidney Powell. 'Please make time for her, let her in,' you told the White House chief of staff."
Perhaps because he was 85% etherized at this point, it apparently slipped Lee’s mind that, thanks to the January 6 select committee, we all saw the emails that Lee sent to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows recommending that the former president* entertain the extraconstitutional schemes and fantasies of Powell and John Eastman. In response, Lee whipped out his pocket Constitution and began waving it around as though he were trying to exorcise McMullin out of Zion entirely. It wasn’t Walker and his Cracker Jack policeman’s badge. But it was close.
Meanwhile, in Ohio, Tim Ryan hung Alex Jones and El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago around the neck of J.D. "Thielbot" Vance. On one of the occasions when Vance—one of the most unlikable and inept politicians of our time—was able to suck in enough oxygen from the Right, he romanced Jones, calling him more credible than Rachel Maddow. He also, as Ryan pointed out, sucked up to the former president* after calling him “America’s Hitler.” Do any of these people realize that we have had recording devices since Fritz Pluemer invented them in 1928, and that now we all can hold them in our hands? The mic’s always hot, guys, and the camera’s always on.
Finally, down in Georgia, Stacey Abrams bounced back from a mediocre performance in the first debate, but it was hard to tell. Between her and incumbent Brian Kemp stood this Libertarian dude named Shane Hazel, who interrupted his career as an unsuccessful xenophobic Republican in order to glom onto the Libertarian brand because the job was open. Whenever it looked as though Abrams and Kemp might engage, Hazel came blundering in with suggestions for how we could run a country of this size without government of any kind.
Hazel has made it quite plain that he sees his purpose in the campaign to throw the race to a run-off by keeping both Kemp and Abrams under 50 percent on Election Day. So he ran over Kemp on the latter’s COVID restrictions, and he ran over Abrams on the existence of public schools, and generally brought his own brand of sweet chaos to a year already overloaded with it.
Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.
