It was sometime around hour 145 of Wednesday night’s Republican presidential debate that the thought set in: Perhaps this was just what life was going to be like from now on. The sun would always set in the west, water would always be the building block of life on Earth, and Jeb Bush would always be fighting with Donald Trump in front of Ronald Reagan’s old airplane.
There will be lots of discussion about just who won or lost the debate, but surely everyone can agree on this: Dear God was it long. CNN’s decision to stretch the proceedings to a punishing 3 hours turned what was always going to be a rather painful slog through the dankest corners of Republican orthodoxy into a grim ordeal. It was so long that by the time it finally ended, some of the candidates onstage, like Scott Walker and Marco Rubio, had taken on the air of sickly medieval patients about to collapse from consumption or the plague.