Jim Webb killed a man. CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked him, as he had asked all the Democratic candidates on stage for their first 2016 debate, which enemy of theirs they were most proud of, and the former Virginia senator just came right out and said his best enemy was the Vietnamese soldier who lobbed a grenade at him, and who then was killed by Jim Webb. It was a terrifying moment. Webb wants to be president, and he was up there on stage telling a grim joke about how his enemies die by his hand.

That bizarre moment was nonetheless probably the high point for Webb’s debate performance, given that he’d spent much of his speaking time to that point complaining about how he wasn’t getting any speaking time. He managed to perform only slightly better than former Rhode Island governor Lincoln Chafee, who evinced the seriousness and gravitas of a confused ferret. Chafee explained at one point that he shouldn’t be held responsible for a 1999 vote to deregulate Wall Street because he was new to the Senate and his father had just died and he deserved a do-over. That these two numskulls together represented a full 40 percent of the debate participants helps to explain why Hillary Clinton was the runaway winner of the first Democratic debate.

Clinton turned in a solid debate, but was aided by her opponents’ weak performances on the big stage