Charles Pierce: the GOP’s Waterboarding Championship

The way Rick Perry’s epic stumble on Wednesday consumed the media oxygen this week, it’s no surprise that Saturday night’s debate was a bit of a letdown. But Esquire’s Charles Pierce says it was still a smorgasbord of foreign-policy ignorance. Bachmann gushed over China’s lack of food stamps and other social programs, and eagerly announced her support for waterboarding. “The last time I heard a woman talk that enthusiastically about torture, it cost me eight bucks for a Halloween midnight show in a movie theater on the north side of Milwaukee.” Huntsman and Paul's “pestering” about the law didn’t stop the rest from joining in torture celebration. “It was a debate that veered from the transcendentally loopy to the tediously tentative.”