WHAT TO EXPECT.

I’m busy Thursday, but it’s okay because I have some great inside dope on how that Republican debate will go down from a lady who said she was psychic, or a sidekick, or psycho, I don't know, but she sounded sure of herself. Here are the good parts:

Chris Christie, emaciated and frail, will appear confused and rambling, and after ten seconds break down and admit to America, “It’s this goddamn lapband surgery. They told me after a while I wouldn’t miss it — that great big old styrofoam clamshell heaped with hot ground beef and peppers and a loaf of French bread on the side — Big Gulps lined up like shots at a wild west saloon - and I know, I know I couldn’t get all that down now if I tried — but I want it.” His jaw will press forward, showing teeth: ”I goddamn WANT IT!” he’ll roar, falling ravenously upon the fingers of Donald Trump, which he will have mistaken in his delirium for sausages, and be hauled off the stage.

“The media elite, they’re lying about me,” Ben Carson will say. “Once again, they’re saying I compared Obama to Hitler.” The crowd will groan. “But it’s true,” Carson will say. "They say that. But it’s not the same thing. It’s just not the same thing to say this: Look everybody, I’m Obama," and then he’ll give a Nazi salute and goose-step around the stage, dropping on the ground little fetus effigies made of surimi and mashing them with his jackboots. This will receive wild applause, which will mostly drown out Carson crying “FINAL SOLUTION FOR UNBORN BABIES,” which Fox News commentators will later claim was actually a Bible quotation about food stamps.

Ted Cruz will come onstage with a rifle, hold it over his head, and cry, “COME AND TAKE IT!” to wild applause. But when the applause dies down he’ll still be holding up the rifle. “I’m serious,” he’ll say. “Come and take it! I don’t see any of you coming forward, just as no one came forward when Hitler laid a specter over Western Europe. And then — came the war.” Cruz will fire the rifle into the ceiling, a chunk of which will come down and fall heavily on Marco Rubio, knocking him unconscious. “Poor Marco,” Cruz will cry as he is restrained by guards, “another victim of Obama’s appeasement.”

Jeb Bush will seem at first to be doing well, if only by comparison and very clumsily ("This Iran deal is not a deal with, actually it is, it's a deal of the devil, with the devil. Not the literal devil, I don't believe Obama is... it's not the devil but the devil's in the details and it's a bad deal"). But someone in the control room will notice that Bush's responses are tracking remarkably closely with the reactions of a live dial-testing group conducted by Frank Luntz on CNN. The moderator will bring this up, and Bush will go into a spasm, ejecting from his jacket some sort of device that will break into pieces on the floor. "Fourscore and seven years ago," Bush will say as the pieces are swept up and inspected, "ask not what your country, my fellow America."

Instead of responding appropriately to questions, Donald Trump will at every availability promote his new project, Trump Branson. Sample: "This Obama's making a mess of everything, but he can't make a mess of Branson, Missouri, wonderful town, beautiful people, and site of the new Trump Branson, a ten-thousand unit hotel, entertainment and fine dining complex in the heartland of America. That's ten THOUSAND, as in four zeroes, like the zeroes we have running against me here tonight." At one point he will demand that, in lieu of his response to a question on national infrastructure, a Trump Branson promotional film be shown. And it will be.

"I'm not saying that old-fashioned siding isn't quaint or it didn't do the job it was supposed to do," Scott Walker will say. "I'm saying that this new siding is made of carborundum, and it can't rust, it can't break, if lightning hits it it won't conduct the electricity, if you hit it with a missle it'll just turn that missle into a little old crumpled ball of paper and drop it on the ground, like I'm dropping these coffee grounds here, and I'm doing it to make a point, which is that this vacuum cleaner can pick up anything, coffee grounds, dust, rocks, pencils, candy wrappers, the people of Israel, the unborn, I don't care what anyone says, death threats, intimidation, with your prayers, and my wife and I feel them, we will pick up anything and everything, and that's a promise from me to you."

The other candidates will just go "awwwwwwk" and turn into steam. And George Pataki will be found dead, his face pressed against the crack at the bottom of the door of the auditorium like Injun Joe in Tom Sawyer.