i did watch the republican debate last night. perry's attack on romney as a 'hypocrite' etc for employiing illegal aliens was shockingly combative, but it's not exactly a policy difference. really i have reached the conclusion that perry is an idiot (this is someone who spent years defending the intelligence of george w and reagan, or rather attacking the constant iq-oriented abuse they took as mindless elitism and self-congratulation); i doubt there was a single really syntactical sentence out of perry the whole night, and he displays mastery of no subject-matter. if he did, you could not know it from the way he speaks. but he did put romney in struggle mode.
the fact that everyone was sitting there with a disclaimer like 'it's tough to lose your home,' and then going on to say that they wouldn't help anyone with that and that banks should foreclose more and faster, was a bit disconcerting. and one thing you definitely see: there is absolutely no human sympathy or connection in any of their approaches. bachmann was striking in this regard; she almost teared up as she told 'moms' to 'hang on,' etc. now, i don't know that she has any help in mind either, but i know that there's something wrong with the emotional set-up of republicans in this regard; that was the only even pseudo-human response to the disaster going on around them right there in vegas. you get the same thing on immigration, where the consensus position seems to be to electrocute desperate people or rain death on them from the skies.
santorum always appears more sincere and more thoughtful than the rest of these people, especially when it comes to religious questions.
i thought paul did well this time out, though. it helps that he has this immediate trillion-dollar cut thing to focus on, and he consistently surprises everyone with attacks on corporate greed, regulatory capture, big drug companies, militarism, etc.
