Long GOP Primary Devolved into Train-Wreck TV

So after several months and countless TV debates the Republican party has reluctantly settled on Mitt Romney as its presidential candidate. My first thought, is what the hell just happened? Was it really necessary for us to sit through those god-awful debates, where a gay soldier was booed and people dying from lack of healthcare was cheered?

As a writer and humorist, I first thought the debates were great material, but after the 20th debate, even I had enough. It got to be torture to watch the GOP's display of motley candidates go through their routines. All the debates did is highlight some of the wackiest "candidates" I have seen in a long time.

I put the word candidates in quotations because I found it hard to take some of them seriously. People like Rep. Michele Bachmann, a woman so embarrassingly stupid she makes Sarah Palin look qualified. And the walking punch line Herman Cain, a candidate who has never won a political race in his life. The most recent to drop out was the GOP's own Don Quixote Newt, Gingrich, a candidate who put his campaign on hold to go gallivanting off to Greece with his trophy wife.

And let's not forget Rick Perry, a candidate billed as the GOP's great white hope, who shot himself in the foot with an on-stage brain fart and a bizarre, rambling speech. What's even scarier is that Perry says that he wants to run in 2016! And bringing up the rear (no pun intended) was Rick Santorum, with his medieval views on birth control and comments about college education being snobbish. Ironic coming from a man who has two college degrees.

It seems to be clear that after a while the race was not about selecting a candidate, it was about creating good TV. As bad as the debates were, they did boost MSNBC, CNN and FOX News' ratings. (I even tuned into FOX News, a channel I avoid like the plague, to catch one of the debates.) As some critics said, the GOP presidential primary turned into one long, painful reality show, with viewers tuning in each week to see which candidate, or should I say contestant, had been eliminated.

And while it might have been good for television ad sales, it got old real quickly. The extremist views expressed during the debates only turned moderates voters away from the GOP, and the wacky candidates only raised questions about the party's political judgment. I saw several cartoons and Internet memes describe the debates as the "Committee to reelect President Barack Obama."

When candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton fought out a bruising primary, they inflicted damage on each other, but the GOP primary inflected damage on the whole country. A column by German magazine Der Spiegel said the Florida debate "devolved into a horror show of absurdities." Can you blame them?