It would be futile to search for any depth or dignity in last night's squalid, untethered ferment of a debate, so I won't try. I shall instead content myself with the eminent Matt Drudge's headline that Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio were the shallowest and least dignified of the 10 contestants, and so they were the "winners." That, anyway, is what Drudge's readers believe.
Out of more than 224,000 votes cast online by the Druidlike Drudgers (as of 6 a.m.), Trump's scorecard registered 55 percent, Cruz's was at 21 percent, and Rubio's 10. (I take it that Drudge's disciples are nonetheless an impious lot: Ben Carson received only 4 percent in the voting. No white puffs of smoke for Ben.)
Are online polls unscientific? Doubtless they are. But when it comes to pseudoconservative doctrine, one need look no further than The Drudge Report, where, as in all doctrines, ideology wafts over reality, and thus reality the ideology becomes. At least for the truest believers.
Drudge's Trump-propping poll consoled me (you hang in there, Donald, you hang in there), for that wickedest of all political players — the fearsome mainstream media — has declared Rubio and Cruz the winners. Why? From what I can gather, it's because Rubio and Cruz blasted the media more than did other contestants — which is something of a paradox, since the media are fearsome precisely because they are so doggedly biased. Yet here are those blasted media slackers praising the very two demagogues who blasted them most.
One would think the virulent media would go out of their way to bash those who bashed them. But I further gather that the media, while flagrantly biased against against all conservatives (as well as the liberal Hillary Clinton and all other liberals), are also too incompetent to take revenge. This piles one paradox of a question atop another: If they're so blasted incompetent, how can the media be so dreadfully fearsome?
I must leave this for another day, or perhaps never, for I meddle in religious beliefs. It is an article of deepest faith among partisans that the mainstream media are out to "get" their guy or gal, be he or she conservative or liberal; indeed, if only the dastard media were fair and balanced (as are non-media folks such as Sean Hannity and Rachel Maddow), each partisan's candidate would be headed straight to the White House. The electorate would shed its media-imposed blinkers and roar in support of the one and only true candidate — all, what, 17 of them, not counting assorted third-party candidates?
That aside, there is one knowable. Bashing the biased, fearsome, incompetent media is the surest way for any candidate — especially a Republican — to incite the masses and thus get loads of swooning press, as Rubio, Cruz, and Trump proved last night and are again proving this morning. Republican candidates have a clear edge in the media-bashing game, for they have been at it since Nixon-Agnew; their partisans are pre-primed. Just assault the media, the crowd goes wild, one's poll numbers jump, simple as that.
And Jeb Bush couldn't figure that out, which is why, by now, he is just that.