It was the debate that was over in less than five minutes.

Although the setting was more dramatic as the numbers dwindled down to a precious few, the Thursday event was again a meaningless discussion signifying nothing. Once again, all the candidates, with the exception of course of Paul, essentially agreed on everything of significance. And there was nothing new in what the congressman had to say either.

This is debate?

No, it’s a festival of nitpicking for the benefit of the mainstream media — aka and f/b/o Barack Obama.

Far and away the most exciting moment, in fact the only moment of faint interest, was the first, when Newt Gingrich excoriated the smarmy John King for opening the debate with a question about his marital life. Newt made mincemeat of King — but even that we have seen before.

This is the political campaign as reality show. Romney, Santorum, Gingrich and Paul — another episode of the Real Housewives of South Carolina. Or is it Desperate Housewives?

I am not exaggerating in the slightest. Unbeknown to the national television audience at home, just previous to the actual broadcast, a warm-up guy for CNN came out to prep the audience, just as they would do at a game show. “Let ‘em hear you, South Carolina!” The audience, well accustomed to “The Voice,” “American Idol” and “The X-Factor,” did just what they were told.

While this was going on, off in the media center where I was sitting, the blasé press around me scarcely looked up at the jumbotrons. They had seen this dozens of times before, hoi polloi being manipulated. When the Pledge of Allegiance began, only a handful of the four hundred or more journos in the room put their hands to their hearts. They continued typing and gossiping.  Elite media indeed.

And then, when Newt did his take down of King, and the audience erupted into a standing ovation, there was not a ripple from the crowd in the media center. They knew this was directed at them. I looked over at Joe Klein who had a smirk on his face.

This is what we have come to in our country. Politics as reality show. Rick the family values scold, randy Newt with his one-liners. Stodgy, reliable Mitt and loony old Ron. What a series.

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I arrived at the debate venue at what I thought was an early 6:30PM but the parking lot of the North Charleston Coliseum was already jammed. It’s a big place, not the Staples Center, but close. It took fifteen minutes or so to find my way to media center.

What impresses me that is despite Twitter and Facebook, despite other new media companies you may or may not love, when it comes to the flow of information, to who is or is not let in the door, this is still an old media MSM world. The debate coverage here is entirely a CNN show, straight down to the mediocre catering (okay, it’s free). They determine who gets in the door and who doesn’t.

One of the things they determined is that PJM only gets one seat at the table, so that will be me and not Bryan, not because of any reason more special than I was the one who sent the original email and was credentialed. Bryan will get the privilege of viewing the debate from a more interesting venue, like a local bar, and interviewing the patrons who will be, in all probability, more interesting than the perpetual talking heads here in the media center.

Many of them are recognizable faces but I’m not exactly sure for what. Maybe for being the ones to gain access first – and they are determined to keep their perquisites. Journalism, after all, is not a highly skilled endeavor, not cardiology – or even screenwriting. Almost anyone can do it to some degree if they pay attention and try to be honest. So the protective walls are up and not crumbling as quickly as we sometimes think.

Of course I won’t be seeing the debate directly either. I will be watching on one of two huge screens provided for the press by CNN as four hundred of us sit there and dutifully type away on our wifi connected laptops (pw: CNN=WIFI), anxious to be the first to report the crucial gaffe or whatever

Our democracy has become a spectacle that outruns reality. It is mostly bad theatre, although today the theatre has been stepped up a notch with the gods of comedy prevailing – history being played the second time as farce, as Marx famously said in the 18th Brumaire, one of his few statements to stand the test of time.

As I type this, I watch one of the screens where Gingrich is being shown, walking into the complex. The lower third reads: “Gingrich-ex: He wanted an ‘open marriage’”

Open marriage, I think. What a phrase out of the past. I remember using it often in my 1974 novel Wild Turkey. The second time as farce, indeed.

Politico has called this the “campaign’s wildest day.” They’re probably right – so far. But it’s time to give this all some serious thought. What exactly do about our democracy? And I’m talking about real democracy, not democracy as played out by CNN, et al. (Simon, stop being rude to your hosts. Okay, okay.)

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What a day…. Newt’s sex life. Mitt’s Cayman life. Rick Perry’s sayonara. Ron Paul blocking traffic with an air balloon? Whoever said South Carolina would be boring?

My flight from DC to Charleston was like the “zoo plane” revisited. I had been on that press plane before — twenty five years ago when (I kid you not) I was sent by Universal Pictures to write an (obviously never filmed) movie with Whoopi Goldberg as a member of the White House press corps. I was able to hitchhike a ride on the “zoo plane” then (a 747 filled with showoff reporters that trails Air Force One) when it followed Reagan to Florida to deliver a speech at a Tallahassee high school

But that was another era and another me. Still, this trip, on a commercial flight, was even more star-studded with media lights making the trek from the nation’s capital for what promises to be the biggest knock-down, drag-out fight yet of this debate-happy campaign.

On the flight with me, I spotted Paul Begala, the shall-we-say loquacious Deborah Wasserman-Schultz, and Romney-supporter Bay Buchanan. (No, they weren’t sitting together, as I’m sure you might guess.)

Seated next to me, entirely by accident, was onetime PJ Media contributor, among many other things, Fred Thompson. Irony of ironies, the last time I had been to Charleston was to interview Fred in 2008 at the beginning of his presidential bid.

We discussed the campaign so far. I won’t detail the former presidential candidate’s views here. I didn’t ask, but assumed they were off the record. But suffice it to say, like most of us he’s worried about the Republican bloodletting and what it means for the general election.

I met Bryan Preston at the airport. We dropped Fred at his hotel and checked into ours, which is crawling with almost as much media as the OJ trial.

The concierge asked: “You guys are from the media, eh? Who’s going to win here Saturday?”

I said: “He’s from Texas and I’m from L.A. You’re from here. You tell us.”

“I think it’s gonna be Newt,” he said.

“What about all those affairs coming out?”

“Does anybody care about that?” said the concierge.

Who knows? Newt’s poll numbers are exploding here — or seem to be. The results are anybody’s guess and the debate tonight grows in importance. But however it turns out, the Republican Party may be headed for a train wreck.

Just then, PJ Media legal editor J. Christian Adams walked up to us. We asked him to join us for lunch.

“I can’t,” he said. “I’m too nervous. I have to work on my speech.” I looked at him curiously. “I’m on the schedule to speak tomorrow between Gingrich and Ron Paul.”

Wow, I thought. I knew Christian had done some excellent work for us and others. But this was impressive.

Then it struck me. The way things are going, the Republicans need a fresh candidate without a lot of baggage.

Yes, I know he’s never been elected to anything. But he has a great family, he’s a really smart guy and a superb lawyer. And one thing’s for sure — he’d never have Eric Holder as his attorney general.

Adams in ’12. It starts now. I’m going to the debate with him tonight and we’ll see if it has legs.

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Okay, I don’t really consider myself a pundit-pundit, but I owe the readers of this website an apology:

I am a lousy judge of character. Don’t ever trust me again — or at least vet me extremely carefully.

I fell for Rick Perry, a man less qualified, it turns out, to be president than my dead grandmother. Yes, I had gone shooting with him in Austin and then to the NASCAR races and thought he was a swell guy.

But that has as much to do with being president, or even running for president, as flipping burgers at McDonald’s has to do with designing an iPad.

Although he had my early backing (I even tried to help with a teensy bit of speechwriting – something I never should have done given my occupation), Perry was a lousy candidate. Even beyond being a now famously inarticulate debater, on the stump he had almost nothing significant to say other than that he created jobs in his state, which he repeated ad infinitum, ad nausea as if some “political pro” (there’s an occupation for you) was perpetually whispering in his ear to stay on message. Oh, how he stayed. His campaign went nowhere.

But now it’s gotten worse. Perry has accused Romney of being a “vulture capitalist” at Bain Capital, just because some of the companies Bain invested in failed. Of course, that’s always true with such investments — and nobody forced anyone to take Bain’s money in the first place.

This basically anti-market propaganda from Perry would more normally come from a Norwegian socialist. The Texas governor sounds like a desperate hypocrite who is so ambitious he would be willing to take anything and anyone down with him. Shame on him. And shame on me.

Fortunately, I had long ago moved on, first for a brief pit stop with Herman Cain and then on to – Newt Gingrich.

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Although no genius, ABC commentator and former Clinton advisor George Stephanopoulos is not stupid. Nevertheless, he seemed like an outright doofus (or yahoo!) as host of the ABC/Yahoo New Hampshire debate on Saturday when he kept pressing Mitt Romney on the constitutionality, of all things, contraceptives.

No, that wasn’t an episode of Saturday Night Live or Fawlty Towers. It was a typical mainstream media operative, unable to control his bias, desperately seeking to expose the Republican frontrunner in some manner or to create some kind of gaffe that would damage him for the general election.

Romney, to his credit, treated the gotcha question with the proper amount of amused disdain, allowing Stephanopoulos to dig a yet bigger hole for himself and turning the audience in the candidate’s favor.

In this essentially meaningless exchange, Stephanopoulos became the poster boy for the whole debate process in which a long line of Republican candidates have paraded themselves for inspection in front of panel after panel of largely liberal media interlocutors.

Fortunately for the Republicans, those interlocutors haven’t been very good at what they do. Part of the reason is that liberal (Keynesian) economics is for all intents and purposes defunct and everybody knows that — so those liberal journalists don’t really have anywhere to go on the key issue of the campaign. Another reason may be that they are not as skilled as we, or they, think they are. A third may be that the Republicans were inflicting sufficient wounds all by themselves.

Still, the entire summa of now fifteen debates has yielded little of substance or depth. We learned that Rick Perry isn’t very good at debating (but has gotten somewhat better), that Newt Gingrich is very good at debating (but allows his thin skin to make him worse), that Ron Paul has adamant supporters and doesn’t worry about the mullahs (no surprise), that Rick Santorum is socially conservative and does worry about the mullahs (again no surprise) and that Romney makes a relatively unflappable frontrunner (probably a good trait for a president).

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After listening to so many Republican debates I can no longer count them, one thing became clear: There were almost no significant policy distinctions between the candidates in the domestic arena. All were basically minor differences, although often inflated for political purposes. What set the candidates apart were qualities of personality, electability and experience, not the issues.

Much of the bickering concerned who would best follow through on their conservative principles, something which is of course mere speculation until they are elected.

Only in the area of foreign affairs was there a substantive policy difference and in that area one candidate — Ron Paul — stood out. He was the sole isolationist (or even relative isolationist) on the stage. Every other candidate was considerably firmer than the incumbent president in his or her support for a strong American defense, not to mention for a steadfast opposition to a nuclear Iran. Paul was by himself on the opposite side, further to the left on national defense than Barack Obama.

So it was Ron Paul’s foreign policy views that were repudiated by Iowa Republicans on Tuesday.

And they were roundly repudiated — 79 to 21 by the vote percentages.

Paul was defeated by Rick Santorum, a foreign policy hawk who called Paul’s views “disgusting,” and by Mitt Romney, whose opinions are similar to Santorum’s (as were all the other candidates’ in the Iowa caucus).

Paul sought to place a positive spin on his third place finish in a “victory” speech, but it rang hollow as his son, Senator Rand Paul, standing behind him, conspicuously stopped applauding when his father’s words turned to foreign policy. The Senator had the look of someone who wished he were someplace else.

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The Los Angeles arsonist who has been making news the last few days for lighting perhaps forty car fires is operating in my hood. Just now I drove back from dinner past the Hollywood & Highland complex, only minutes from my house, where the night before this mysterious person ignited a Camaro. The LAPD is now describing him as “an older white male with a receding hairline and shoulder-length ponytail.”

In these parts that’s not exactly a small subset. It’s a good description of roughly half the males shopping at the Hollywood Farmers’ Market every Sunday morning. Knock on any door, as they say.

As of now, there’s no word from those same police on the motivation, but arsonists in general are known to be on the far side of normal, at least we can all hope they are.

But it’s hard to resist seeing this guy, whoever he is and whatever reasons he has for doing what he’s doing, as a creature of our times, the externalization of the madness all around us, not just in Hollywood… but, of course, especially here.

We seem to be living a reprise of Nathaniel West’s classic The Day of the Locust, published in 1939, another year that was not so good. West wrote of Hollywood burning then, during the Great Depression, and it’s burning now.

Tonight, outside Katsu-ya, a swank sushi joint designed by Philippe Starck, I saw a heavyset black guy in a top hat and multicolored tails forcing the swells waiting for their valeted cars — still Mercedes and Beemers — to listen to personalized raps he would sing to them whether they wanted to hear them or not. Trust me, almost none of them wanted this serenade, but they paid him anyway. Blood money, of sorts.

The City of Angels is filled with grifters, working any angle they can find. And it looks to be getting worse, although we are told that unemployment has fallen a few decimals to 11.3%. Of course that “optimistic” stat came from only 6600 actual new jobs for November in a state where 1.1 million are said to be unemployed. That would make the California unemployed by themselves the tenth biggest city in America, slightly smaller in population than Dallas. And that’s without counting the unknowable number who have given up looking for work and are out there working the streets.

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If Ron Paul is not a racist, he is certainly terrible at picking employees and colleagues. Paul’s excuse for the bigoted, homophobic comments in the much-discussed “Ron Paul Newsletter” of some years ago is that he didn’t write them himself. Someone else did.

But who chose those others to work with him on the “Ron Paul Newsletter”? Who vetted the writers and editors of the very articles with those horrific statements? Well, one must assume, Ron Paul.

That inability to select even marginally acceptable (non-racist) employees and colleagues should, on the face of it, disqualify Paul as a candidate for president of the United States. Can you imagine such a myopic individual, such a poor judge of character, choosing justices for the Supreme Court, not to mention myriad other important positions?

But that’s giving Paul the best of it. Occam’s Razor tells us Paul knew perfectly well the kind of tripe his minions were writing (if he didn’t write it himself), just as Barack Obama — despite his protestations — knew perfectly well the kind of bilge that Jeremiah Wright was spewing. In fact, they went along with it for much the same reason — political expediency — although Paul arguably believed the despicable remarks in his newsletters more than Obama ever believed Wright’s excrescences. After all, Paul’s writings (including solicitation letters) went out under his own name.

Still, the Paulites are saying, that was years ago. Give it a rest.

That’s hard because the problem runs far deeper and has contemporary ramifications. Paul’s racial bias is more complex and intense than what has already been alleged of his attitudes towards blacks and Jews. He thinks even less of Muslims. He treats the Islamic world as if they do not have views of their own, their own ideology. In essence, he does not take them seriously as people and claims their actions are largely a result of American (and presumably Western) imperialistic behavior.

In other words, Muslims are children who could not possibly have the beliefs they do of their own accord and choose to act on those beliefs. They only do what they do because of us.

Besides being ethnocentric in the extreme, this negates many centuries of history — the majority of which took place before the U.S. even existed — and an entire, highly evolved system of religious, philosophical, and social thought. Whether Paul does this out of ignorance or arrogance I am not sure, but his disregard of Islam as something to be taken seriously in and of itself is particularly stunning when that ideology is close to the most antithetical imaginable to Paul’s self-proclaimed libertarianism.

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It was only a week or so ago that I made (with the help of the estimable Ben Ziegler) a short video entitled What Do We Do About The Donald? (also here). It was intended to be a goof, riffing on Trump’s supposed presidential ambitions and suggesting a better use of his abilities, i.e. to take over the United Nations, turning that useless institution into the “Trump UN,” a potentially hugely successful, if admittedly vulgar, luxury hotel.

Little did I know that Trump is yet more serious about his presidential aims to the extent that the TV personality/real estate tycoon has already bolted the Republican Party. From ABC’s The Note:

Trump took another step in that direction on Thursday, switching his party affiliation from Republican to “unaffiliated,” according to a source close to the reality television star.

According to the source, he did so because he is “disgusted” with the way Republicans are handling matters in Washington, including the recent payroll tax cut deal. But the move also sets Trump up for a potential third-party run for president — a possibility he began talking about almost as soon as he told his fans in May he wasn’t running.

The smart money is betting this is no more than another publicity stunt to keep The Donald in the public eye and forever a fixture on the Greta Show. And that’s probably right and for that reason this column plus my video are just more grist for Trump’s mill. (I’m waiting for my check.)

Still, the smart money is often wrong. And Trump’s ego is, as I noted in the video, the size of Brooklyn. He may really run.

Which leads me to my main subject, the role of egotism in politics. It is one of the perils of democracy, especially a modern one in a giant country like ours. Who but an egomaniac would have the desire and the sense of entitlement to think he or she should lead the United States of America?

In this election season, we are in the midst of a festival of egomania. Some candidates hide it better than others, but it is always there.

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I usually enjoy the Greta Show, although, like all hosts, she has an obsession with certain guests. How many times do we have to hear her asking whether Sarah Palin is running for president? Or for that matter, Donald Trump. But I must confess I have a weakness for The Donald. For all his off-the-charts self-promotion, he sometimes comes up with an interesting idea. And he is a man who knows how to get things done. So, I have the following proposal for him. It’s supposed to funny (I hope), but it’s actually quite serious.

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