Wacky Surefire Cliches To Look For In Tonight's Republican Debate

As sure as clockwork, you can expect several wacky cliches to pop up over and over again tonight on the Republican debate to be held at the Reagan Library in California.

1. John McCain will compete with the others to claim that he's the legitimate heir of Ronald Reagan. Okay.

2. Antitax rhetoric will spend freely as well. Yet few will mention the current out of control reckless spending by the current Republican Administration, which includes the budget busting Iraq War which has now cost at least $442. 4 billion dollars so far.

3. A wacky loose cannon screwball candidate will emerge in tonight's debate. In the Democratic debate it was former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel, who expertly played the role of the goofy black shhep relative. Tonight it is more than likely to be Rep. Tom Tancredo. Watch him make goofy racist appeals to the antiimmigrant crowd and appeal to the nut wing of the Republican Party by claiming to be the only legitimate "conservative". Extremists routinely underplay their screwball politics by using innocent sounding terms such as "conservative" to add some legitimacy to their wacky far-out views. Just like the Democrat's Mike Gravel, Tancredo will act as a suitable stand-in for a Ross Perot type nut for this debate, and promise endless laughter for the home viewer for his ridiculous opinions.

4. A theme that will pop up over and over is that the Democrats are somehow causing "surrender" in the Iraq War with their troop withdrawal proposals in Congress. Nonsense. The Democrats had nothing to do with the flawed execution of this war done with woefully inadequate forces of underequipped U.S. soldiers including many National Guard members who even lacked basic essentials such as radios or enough bullets. During the WWII American assault on Iwo Jima for example, 110,000 well armed U.S. Marines were used to dislodge a force of 22,000. The first Gulf War had a coalition force of over 880,000 to dislodge a force of 360,000 Iraqi soliers from Kuwait, and that was with using many high tech bombers and other weapons that avoided low tech hand to hand combat. With a force of only 130,000 to 150,000 U.s. forces in Iraq, a nation of 26.7 million persons, with the population more than the size of Australia and Switzerland combined, with some militia organizations with as many as 100,000 armed members, and milions in Iraq openly supporting either Sunni or Shiite insurgents, as well as the far smaller Al Qaeda organization, there was no mathematical way to expect victory in Iraq. This war was lost from the beginning when way too few troops were sent in by the Bush Administration war planners who did not plan for a long term war, equip troops for such a mission. After the fall of Saddam Hussein, most U.S. troops stood around helplessly watching while looters stole anything of value, including robbing ammunition dumps , where shells and other arms eventually became roadside bombs, car bombs and other other weapons. Yet somehow the failure of this war is somehow the fault of the Democrats according to many partisan Republicans. Absurd.

Tonight's debate should prove interesting, but will likely be even more disappointing than last week's Democratic nonevent.