When last night's Republican presidential candidates debate wound its way around to foreign policy, one could only hope that the rest of the world was not watching. But at least it had its moments of entertainment value, if you could forget the fact that these people want to be the leader of the free world.
Michele Bachmann totally delivered, bless her heart.
"Obama put us in Libya and now he's putting us into Africa."
So she's a little shaky on geography. Okay, a lot shaky on geography. But really, do you have to be able to read a world map to be president? There are advisers for all that stuff, right?
Then we got around to negotiating with terrorists, which Herman Cain said he totally wouldn't do except that earlier he said that he totally would but he didn't understand that question and what were we talking about? That let Bachmann fly her Ronald Reagan flag: "I would have a policy that said we absolutely do not negotiate with terrorists," just like Ronnie.
Which led to just about the best moment in the whole shebang. Charlie Pierce picks it up from here.
And then Ron Paul won my heart forever.
"So," he said, "you would oppose that policy in the Reagan years when they were selling missiles to Iran?"
An Iran-Contra gotcha in the middle of a Republican debate in 2011? I intend to take Ron Paul to prom this spring. No kidding: We didn't even have many of those when Michael Dukakis was running against George H.W. Bush, one of the unindicted architects of the scheme, in 1988—nor many in 1992, either. Bill Clinton was content to beat up Daddy Bush on the economy, while Daddy Bush was planning to pardon everyone except Shoeless Joe Jackson on his way out the door.
Ron Paul is a kook, but he's occasionally a delightfully inconvenient truth-teller when he gets on that stage. As you'd guess, that bit didn't go over so well with the crowd.
But the real low light came courtesy of an idiot Republican audience member who's never read a fact check about the crushing burden that is our foreign aid. They all leaped onto that one, with Perry thundering that he'd defund the United Nations (black helicopter alert!), and everyone would slash foreign aid to everybody but Israel except Ron Paul who would cut out Israel, too.
Which pretty much defines current policy (except for the defunding the UN thing). Because foreign aid is a tiny little miniscule part of the federal budget, around one percent. And guess which country get the largest share of that tiny little fraction of our budget? Yes, Israel. So yeah, though Republicans are either too duplicitous to mention that (including Ron Paul) or too ignorant to understand it.
You thought George W. Bush was an international embarrassment? Just imagine if we had one of these clowns.