The death march to election day continues

I watched the 12/15 CNN debate and it was genuinely difficult to stomach. Here's what I heard:

• America won't be safe unless we continue these endless wars and significantly increase defense spending
• I'll demonstrate I'm tougher than Obama by making the current federal spying programs a lot more aggressive!
• "The FBI has the authority to investigate 'un-American' activities." Yeah, it's called McCarthyism.
• I promise to build a stronger, more heavily fortified wall on the Mexican border than _______.

So, overall I saw a complete lack of respect for the lessons of history or the constitution. Going to war in Iraq was a terrible mistake, BOTH times. No one has ever won a war in Afghanistan, ever. Lybia and Egypt are not new democracies, they're new problem spots in the region. Who in their right mind says "if we would just carpet  bomb Syria and then put some boots on the ground this would all get better?" Right, Ted Cruz. 

Kasich was again the only one who suggested that we need to come together as a nation, find common ground, and ditch this us versus them paradigm. The others promptly ran him over with a bulldozer. For most of the rest of them it was a contest of who could be more arrogant, the exceptions being Ben Carson who yet again shattered the stereotype that brain surgeons are smart, and Carly Fiorina who is the female equivalent of Mitt Romney - a disconnected elitist. 

I noticed something interesting when the talk turned to national security and the NSA spying program - Rubio & Bush openly criticized Cruz and Paul for even talking about the program. I figured that was just debate showmanship. Turns out that the head of the Senate intelligence committee (try not to laugh too hard at the fact that those three words appear on a door somewhere in DC) felt Cruz and perhaps Paul revealed too much detail about how much the program was expanded in its most recent renewal. Here's an excerpt:

"The backlash to Cruz’s remarks reinforces the lack of an open, democratic discussion of surveillance programs. And although elements of the programs must remain classified to preserve their effectiveness, the total blackout on information about them keeps the public from being able to make informed decisions about the lawmakers and officials they elect.

“Sure, we can talk about the capabilities of Section 702,” said Jake Laperruque, a fellow at New America’s Open Technology Foundation, referring to a different NSA program that scoops up data straight from the physical infrastructure of the Internet. “But it’s hard to have a meaningful debate about it when you can’t tell the American people whether a few hundred or a few million of them are being swept up in a warrantless surveillance program.”

I thought the GOP was supposed to be for small government and protecting individual liberties? Yet all they could do was try to out-do each other in terms of how authoritarian they would be in terms of domestic and foreign policy. Absolutely pathetic.