This is copied from the Dailykos. Beautiful transcript fun to read. Much better than watching the debate itself. Ron Paul gets huge cheer during intros. All red ties, more or less, with the exception of Brownback's Gray Steel. McCain wearing a candy cane around his neck. Ha! First question: Was Freddy smarter than you guys for waiting to declare? HUCK: Oooh, rips him, comparing him to "No-show George Jones." PAUL: Freddy's just another warmonger. MCCAIN: Maybe this is past Fred's bedtime! Ho ho! Now I'm not the old man anymore! WILLARD: Hey, wait till February, Fred. Q2: Immigration, to Mitt. You didn't stop illegal immigration as governor -- you let illegals mow your own lawn. WTF? WILLARD: Well, look. You can't expect employers to enforce the law and actually check their IDs. I'm tougher because I say I'm tougher. RUDY: Like Mitt, I'm a lot tougher than my record indicates. Listen to what I say. Ignore what I've done. MCCAIN: I, too, am far tougher on immigrants than you may think. HUCK: Wow. He actually isn't backing down from his statement that a lot of anti-immigrant folks are racist. Surprising. TANCREDO: (Oooh, wait for it . . .) I'm the only credible candidate! The rest of these guys are bandwagon jumping flip-floppers! (Actually, not as crazy as I expected.) HUNTER: I love my San Diego border fence, and I'm going to keep building that fence right down that border. Q3: Homespun questions from a diner, brought to you by Carl Cameron. The questioner is a Massachusetts cop -- more on immigration. Gist is that this is a big, complicated problem -- how do we fix it? Cameron rephrases this to ask MCCAIN how his bill wasn't amnesty. RUDY: Secure borders, control illegal immigration, tough, etc. MCCAIN: It's not amnesty when you're fining the crap out of poor working people. WILLARD: Sure, John. It's amnesty. Close down sanctuary cities. Amnesty. Amnesty. That's wrong. Enforce the law. Q4: What's all this about Larry Craig un-resigning? BROWNBACK: Oh, no no no. He said he's resigning. No backsies. We're the values party. Need to rebuild the family, even if our party's leaders are getting arrested in men's rooms. HUNTER: Craig better stay resigned. And unlike Democrats, we kick the queers out when they become a liability. Dems make them committee chairs. (Hi, Barney!) Abortion? Thoughts? WILLARD: Overturn Roe v. Wade, allow states to fashion own laws to protect sanctity of life, abortion is taking of human life, but we should love murderous mothers. HUCK: We need to show the same respect for children everywhere, whether in a womb or a coal mine. (I didn't make that up. He really said that about children in coal mines.) Guns? Why do you hate them, Rudy? RUDY: I made NYC safe. Me. Alone. I'm Bernie Goetz, Curtis Sliwa, and Batman rolled into one, baby. And I didn't need guns. But if you rubes in the sticks want 'em, sure. PAUL: If people could carry guns on planes, 9/11 might not have happened. (All you "liberals for Paul" down with that?) Homespun question from the homespun diner: should there be constitutional amendment banning gay marriage? The audience is about 50/50 on this one. In all seriousness, you gotta love NH. 50/50 on gay marriage at a Republican debate. BROWNBACK: What do you think he said? Seriously. (Commercial. Time to grab a beer.) National Security. MCCAIN: I'm a real expert, unlike the mayor. And the surge is working, and I supported it, but it isn't "the McCain Strategy." RUDY: If I weren't running, I'd be supporting McCain. (Hmm!) I'm not running on 9/11??? (Did he really say that? Good God. Most absurd statement of the night.) WILLARD: Surge appears to be working. Just ask Brookings. Clap louder! MCCAIN: No, damnit, the surge is working!!!! You say it's "apparently" working, but that's not good enough. CLAP LOUDER!!!! PAUL: (Absolutely the right guy to go to after the loyalty oath competition b/w Rudy and McCain.) We shouldn't leave any troops on Arabian peninsula. Leave Iran alone. Need a new foreign policy. Bring troops home. (And arm airline passengers.) CHRIS WALLACE: So should we take our marching orders from al Qaida? Nyah nyah nyah nyah? PAUL: No, you dipshit. BROWNBACK: Mr. Brownback explains Iraqi politics to his 4th grade class. HUCK: I, for one, support this surge that you gentlemen are discussing. Pottery Barn rule (tho since it's Huck he brought it back to the olde tyme country store in Arkansas). Victory with honor. PAUL: America isn't responsible for the acts of a few crazy neocons. HUCK: We are the United States, one nation under God. We stick together. PAUL: We don't march straight on into the Big Muddy!! (God, this is working out BEAUTIFULLY for Huck. He owes Wallace/Hume big time for this.) HUCK: Wrong, commie. HUNTER realizes that he missed the chance to be the guy beating up on Paul. HUCK is content knowing that he just won this debate. Wow, and Rudy and Mitt are shut out of the Paul pile-on. Huckabee just had a terrific ten minutes. Father of serviceman at the Homespun Diner beats up on Willard for comparing his sons' campaigning to real service in Iraq!!! WILLARD: Totally shaken. Wow. Says there is no comparison, acts like he never made the privileged, fatuous comment in the first place. Surveillance -- do you need to follow the law? WILLARD: Sure, but I can't wait to wiretaps mosques and churches. Torture? Guantanamo? TANCREDO: And I can't wait to waterboard people! Top that, bitches. MCCAIN: How many times do I have to remind you jackholes that my friends and I were tortured, that torture sucks, and that it just leads to Americans getting tortured? You chickenhawks make me sick. RUDY: We can't close Guantanamo -- no one will take the prisoners. Shucks, we have an obligation to keep 'em. Can't just put them out on the streets. HUNTER: Guantanamo is the safest place in the world, where no one has ever been murdered. (He really said it! I might retire there. It's like Disney World, only the rooms are cheaper.) Taxes? McCain, why won't you "take the pledge?" MCCAIN: I'll stand on my record, thanks. BROWNBACK: Everyone should sign the pledge. Americans are "taxed to the max." I want to see families keep their own money so that mothers can stay home and birth babies. RUDY: My only pledge is to the Constitution. I'm not going to sign every scrap of paper that some slack-jawed College Republican slides in front of me at a rubber chicken dinner in Keene. Mitt -- you took the pledge, but you loved imposing fees on Massachusetts citizens. WTF? WILLARD: Rather than raise taxes, I liked imposing regressive fees to stick it to working people. Makes sense. And I can't wait to kill the national inheritance tax! (Incredibly lame, contrived Edwards haircut joke follows. Funny coming from the most plastic candidate in two decades.) (And as dougymi points out in comments, he's been waiting for it all night -- it's like it was written on the back of his hand.) PAUL: Eliminate taxes! Shut down the government (including the CIA and FBI -- I'm not making this up)! Homespun Diner guy questions whether Rudy can believe in family values, given that he has none. RUDY: Private life is private. Does not talk about loving wife and kids, or even about how close he is to his cousins. (Wow, that was awful.) (OK, MissLaura will take you home after the ads. It's been real. And FWIW, I think Huck won. You can't buy opportunities like beating up on Ron Paul for hating America.) Oooh, questions based on a plausible scenario featuring Iran. DOOOOMMMM!!! What if they have nuclear weapons, are flipping off the UN, invading Iraq constantly, and the UN won't do anything? What if they're threatening to annihilate Israel? PAUL: The president has to ask Congress. I was in the Air Force during the Cold War, ergo I'm not a wimp. But we should still talk to Iran. That scenario isn't true. Israel has nuclear missiles so they can take care of their own damn selves. Big cheers. NH is certainly an interesting place. Ok, the scenario gets more extreme: Israel is now asking for help. TANCREDO: That scenario kind of makes it a foregone conclusion. But, uh, what about dissent in Iran? Fumble fumble stutter. Political correctness is going to get us all killed!!! (Huh? What political correctness?) If we do go to war, they'll be allowed to torture. HUNTER: This is complicated. Very technical talk. Bottom line: no nukes for Iran, but can't be unilateral. HUCKABEE: Problem is it's a hypothetical. Moderator insists on plausibility of hypothetical. HUCK: "You get on your knees and then you get on your feet and you make a decision." Not promising war, promising to think hard about it. BROWNBACK: Scenario is likely. In fact, it's pretty much already true. Ayatollah Khomeini was scary. GIULIANI: This is not the Cold War. Iran = Islamic terrorism. They'll give the terrorists nukes. So they can't have nukes. Compliments McCain again. (Is he setting up McCain as his VP pick should he be nominated?) Ronald Reagan was awesome, wasn't he? ROMNEY: Iran is genocidal. Let's get on the same page with Democrat leaders. I'm a consensus-builder. We will make them "think twice and abandon their folly." (Why, that's almost biblical.) MCCAIN: The UN won't do anything because Russia and China are bad. Your hypothetical is not hypothetical and I will list for you everything the Bush administration has accused Iran of before invoking Reagan and the Iranian hostage crisis.
Heheheh...pretty good summary from the little of it I could watch. I'm not missing Sopranos reruns and Roddick/Federer to watch these guys. I have to disagree on the Huckabee "you broke it, you bought it" line. Struck me as dangerous nonsense. Honor is important, but I don't see it as a useful guide here. The fact that he does is worrisome. The last thing we need is some guy with a World War I mindset in charge, sending troops off to slaughter because he thinks his honor is threatened. The clear winner last night was Fred Thompson. Basically game over for the other guys.