The good news for Republicans, arguably, is that their rhetoric has been so consistently over-the-top that it has started to sound routine; academics call this "shifting the Overton window," the range of what's considered politically acceptable. I've watched all the debates as well as the undercards live, but when I reviewed the transcripts, I was amazed how many radical statements had slipped under my radar. Ted Cruz called for putting the United States back on the gold standard. Marco Rubio accused President Barack Obama of destroying the U.S. military. Huckabee said Bernie Madoff's rip-offs weren't as bad as what the government has done to people on Social Security and Medicare. Lindsey Graham said his administration would monitor all "Islamic websites," not just jihadist ones. I had even forgotten Trump's claim that vaccines caused autism in a 2-year-old girl he knew.
Vaccines do not cause autism. Goldbuggery is crackpot economics. The U.S. military is still by far the strongest in the world. And what the government has done to people on Social Security and Medicare is give them pensions and health care. But none of those statements drew any pushback from the other Republican candidates, or, for that matter, the media moderators. Neither did Ben Carson's assertion that if the United States had set a goal of oil independence within a decade, moderate Arab states would have "turned over Osama bin Laden and anybody else you wanted on a silver platter within two weeks," which is wackadoodle on multiple
Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/12/republican-debate-wild-ideas-donald-trump-213463#ixzz3vXRasNdZ
---Steve
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