THEY LIVE. This is the first GOP debate I've watched, as opposed to relying on transcripts. Tell me: are all of these things animated Ralph Steadman cartoons? Maybe the glaring police-interrogation lights amplify the animal freakishness of these people, but damn. After hearing National Review compare Huckabee to Kevin Spacey, I wasn't prepared for the squint-headed, bug-eyed monster that actually raves under that name. And nearly all the rest of them are just tubes of meat that, when squeezed, emit a display of polished teeth and psychotic ravings.

The only human beings on the stage are Ron Paul and John McCain. McCain, God bless him, carries on a noble campaign for his own idiosyncratic version of insanity, which I admire because his is a recognizably human affliction, inculcated by years of torture followed by years of having to consort with greedy politicians who were certainly his inferiors. His quiet lunacy is very different from the noisy, slavering power-madness evidenced by the rest of these guys. He's like King Lear standing among (but not of) a pack of Pavlov's dogs.

And Paul, of course, stepped out of the 18th Century to defend the Constitution from these nuts. The Fox News scumbags sigh and giggle, but you can tell they're pissed that they foolishly allowed a debate to take place in New Hampshire, where a free man will always command an audience's respect.

The rest are humanoid pus:

Duncan Hunter: We treat our torture victims too well. Someone should drive a stake through this one's heart and bury him in unconsecrated ground. Thank God his spot-welded body, movie-monster eyebrows, and Queeg-like manipulation of his pen remove him from serious consideration.

Mitt Romney: Heh, heh, heh. Heh, heh, heh, heh. Civil liberties are nothing compared to my desire to be become a real boy! He's like a robot who, between 1994 and 1996, tried to follow his dream of becoming America's first animatronic Baptist preacher; didn't make it but, when called upon to pretend interest in the affairs of us puny mortals, often falls into the old evangelical cadences.

Tom Tancredo: Waterboarding? Torture? Where'd you get that? Oddly, when you close your eyes, he sounds like Spalding Gray with hydrophobia.

Rudolph Giuliani: You forget that, while people were criticizing me for flaunting my mistress, I cut taxes 37 times. I think even Fox has given up on him. His head is swiftly turning into a memento-mori AS YOU ARE, I WAS -- AS I AM, SO YOU WILL BE dessicated skull. Someone obviously told him the jig is up about 9/11 -- now he brags endlessly about what a prick he was running New York. Listen close, death's-head whorefucker: no one in Bumfuck -- and, you know, all America is Bumfuck -- gives a good goddamn.

And... oh, fuck this shit. I'm never getting out of the boat again. Next time I'll read the transcripts and lay out pictures of the Isely Brothers and pretend that's what they look like.

UPDATE. The National Review guys are devoted to denying reality. Andy McCarthy enjoys that the incredibly sleazy accusation by Chris Wallace that Ron Paul defers to Al Qaeda drew applause, but seems to have been out of the room when the crowd rallied to Paul's defense. Kathryn J. Lopez seems to think the New Hampshire crowd's obvious disgust with the malignant Giuliani is a baseball thing. Okay, K-Lo, have it your way: fuck the New York Yankees, fuck Rudolph Giuliani, and fuck you.

UPDATE II. Ron Paul is winning the Fox phone poll; Sean Hannity is looking around for a civilian whose head Fox will allow him to gnaw in frustration. I have reformed my views: the whole world should see how these people operate.