Debate prompted laughs and tears
Well, with Super Tuesday hanging in the balance, the GOP primary gloves have finally come off.
For Democrats, the Thursday night debate was a whiplash ride between head-shaking disbelief and stomach-shaking laughter. For Republicans, it must have been agony.
Better to have given paintball guns to Donald Trump, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz so they could shoot and paint their ways out of the corners they put themselves into. John Kasich tried to be Marshall Dillon. Someone should have sent a search party for Ben Carson.
"Would someone please attack me?" Carson begged as the three front-runners spat at each other and hogged the stage. Carson was ignored. But then what would you expect from someone whose answer to a question about choosing a Supreme Court judge was: "The fruit salad of their life is what I will look at."
MSNBC aptly said the candidates were "channeling their inner Trumps."
Rubio questioned the Donald's "fake school" and asked if he planned to build his border wall as he did the Trump Towers - with undocumented workers. Cruz told Trump he could "get back on your meds now." Trump called Cruz a "basket case" and a "liar" and said Rubio was a "choke artist."
It was way better than watching superstars of the WWF (World Wrestling Federation, for the highbrows in the audience).
The trouble is: Our country is at stake, not our next reality TV binge.
Trump's bad math
There is a famous Mark Twain quote that I'll paraphrase for a family newspaper: There are three kinds of lies: lies, doggone lies and statistics.
Perhaps Twain was gazing into the future and talking about the 2016 GOP primary candidates. Especially Donald Trump.
"You know what I really am happy about?" Trump said in his Nevada caucus victory speech, after ticking off a list of other demographic triumphs. "Cause I've been saying it for a long time: 46 percent with the Hispanics! Forty-six percent! Number one with Hispanics. I'm really happy about that."
Not so fast, because the devil is in the details.
Latinos comprised just 8 percent of the GOP caucus electorate in Nevada on Tuesday, and the numbers Trump based his claim on came from an entrance poll of 1,573 voters. That means Trump's claim that he is "No. 1 with Hispanics" is based on about 125 registered Republicans.
For context, 19 percent of the Democrat caucus electorate in Nevada was Latino.
For still more context: Nationally, 36 percent of Hispanic voters are Republican compared to 62 percent who are Democrats, according to data from the Pew Research Center. President Barack Obama carried 71 percent of the Latino vote in 2012.
Perhaps Trump, who dismisses political correctness and demonizes Hispanics with his "build a wall" and "Mexican rapists" and "anchor baby" comments, was just using a little of the kind of political correctness we sometimes call "branding" to hoodwink some voters into believing he's got an edge that he really doesn't.
The U.S. Hispanic population hovers around 55 million. Of those, around 27 million are eligible to vote. In 2012, roughly half of those eligible Hispanic voters cast a ballot.
Certainly there will be some somewhere who will vote for Trump - for whatever misguided reason.
But it most certainly won't be 46 percent of the whole.
Then there's today's president
Bet you haven't heard much about President Obama's unfavorable rating lately.
There's a good reason. He's pretty much inched his way back into the middle ground with an occasional majority favorable level. Those better ranges are where he had stayed until mid-July 2013 when his favorability numbers rippled down into the lower 40th percentile through the middle of last year, according to a handy graph by the Huffington Post. The Post tracks 944 polls from 74 pollsters. You can see it here: http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/pollster/obama-favorable-rating.
And how has Congress been faring?
Not so well. Since January 2009, the highest job approval Americans have shown for Congress was 36.8 percent in March 2009. That plummeted to 8.4 percent in October 2013, and in late February of this year hovered at 11.8 percent.
Congress, not Obama, is where America's heartburn begins.