I switched back and forth last night between the Republican debate and the track meet that people tried to pass off as a football game. My impressions based on what I saw of the debate were:
- Ron Paul is a lunatic, but some of his ideas are better than anything the rest of them offer.
- Huntsman is trolling.
- Rick Perry’s just zis guy, you know?
- An analysis of Newt Gingrich may be found here.
- Rick Santorum has by far the most appeal to the rank-and-file.
- Mitt Romney doesn’t like hypothetical questions.
None of them seem particularly charismatic, although Paul, Perry and Santorum all seem reasonably amiable.
And lastly, not that it matters, but I got a kick out of Gingrich, Romney and Santorum all screwing up their chance to seem like “regular guys” by getting the date of the college football championship wrong. I don’t blame them, though, because I don’t particularly want a President who spends his leisure time on that. (Also, the game should be played on Saturday. Why on earth do they play it on a work night?)
I loved Paul’s answer about the economics books, though.
UPDATE: Forgot to add one other thing: at one point, Rick Perry said:
“We’re going to see Iran, in my opinion, move back in [to Iraq] at literally the speed of light.” [My italics.]
This sort of thing irritates me. “Literally” means it is actually true, no exaggerations. Perry meant to say “figuratively” which means “not literally”. Now, some people will say that I am just being a “word Nazi” or something. (I prefer “authoritarian linguaphile”.) But look, it’s a perfectly fine figure of speech, but it is not literal!
It is true that Perry is far from the first person to do this. Using the word “literally” to mean exactly the opposite has gone on for quite some time. But it seems to me like a silly practice, since we already have a word that means the opposite of “literally”, to let it have two different and opposite meanings. It’s more of what I was talking about here. Am I wrong about this?
