The Bible, the Confederate Flag, Mars, and Other Silliness at the GOP YouTube Debate

The GOP YouTube Debate started with a country and western song about the candidates. Then it proceeded with a bang when Rudi Giuliani accused Mitt Romney of employing illegal aliens and, in effect, operating a "sanctuary mansion."

The night kind of went downhill from there.

There was the obligatory question about Iraq designed to set Ron Paul off, which he obliged in full glory. Paul seemed to relish the fact that his blaming us (that is the United States) for Islamo Fascist terrorism made some of the audience want to rush the stage. The reason Paul will never be President and might just lose his House seat next year is that he is too much in love with being outrageous.

The big scandal of the night happened when a retired Brigadier General, who had come out as being gay after having concluded his military service, demanded to know why gays couldn't serve openly in the military. A good question, in my opinion, which the candidates with various degrees of deftness deflected. It turned out, though, that the General was a Hillary Clinton operative and had previously been an official of something called "Veterans for Kerry." CNN claimed not to know he was a plant and perhaps it didn't.

The night descended into the surreal, though, with three questions evidently chosen by CNN because it thought that they (and the people asking them) were amusing and more than a little bit weird.

The first came from a fellow who flourished a Bible and demanded of the candidates whether they believed that each and every word in it was literally true. This was a trick question designed to embarrass the person answering it no matter how he answered. If one said yes, one would be pegged as a fundamentalist yahoo. If one said no, the fundamentalist yahoos would get mad.

Mike Huckabee, who is an ordained minister as well as a former Governor, had the best response to the question: