The Republican National Committee announced yesterday that it would be holding no more primary debates. It’s about time. The debates presented nothing, literally nothing, more than dart boards for Democrats and progressive pundits to aim at. Few watched the things other than desperate NeverTrumpers. If Donald Trump had participated, the four events might have been consequential. It would have been ethical and responsible of Trump to stand on the same stage as his competition and allow them to challenge him, but it also would have been stupid. He could only lose by taking that chance.

To celebrate the demise of this completely pointless exercise, Ethics Alarms offers a few observations on the final installment.

1. It began with a lie. Moderator Megyn Kelly: “On stage tonight, four candidates all vying to become their party’s nominee and given the state of affairs in our political system right now, one of you might very well do it.”

2. Ronald Reagan memorably said that it was a “commandment” that Republicans “shalt not” speak ill of any fellow Republican. RR was astute: these kind of scorpions-in-a-bottle displays only weaken the party and give aid and comfort to Democrats. Reagan’s “11th Commandment” seems especially relevant because a full half of the debaters last week were only there to troll the other Republicans on stage and, in bitter Chris Christie’s case, Donald Trump too. Neither the disgraced former New Jersey governor nor class clown Vivek Ramaswamy have a slice of an iota of a scintilla of a micro-chance of getting the Republican nomination, so they are wasting time, diverting attention, and indulging their egos to the detriment of everyone else.

3.Nikki Haley, sadly, is a weasel. Ramaswamy accurately characterized her bone-headed suggestion that anonymous statements and aliases should be forbidden on social media, and Haley denied it, then changed the subject. She could have simply said that she was wrong. That would have been refreshing. She can’t be trusted.

4. Kelly asked Chris Christie to explain why he endorsed Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020 and “gave him an A for his first term,” but is now “calling him a liar, a loser, a con man, and someone who cannot win.” Christie filibustered and finally said, “I’m in this race because the truth needs to be spoken, he is unfit. This is a guy who just said this past week that he wants to use the Department of Justice to go after his enemies when he gets in there. And the fact of the matter is he’s unfit to be president…” But Chris, why is this a different guy than the one you endorsed twice? Because Trump says what he wants to do to the fake journalists who have been trying to destroy him? Trump can want to do all sorts of things: he can’t touch journalists. I bet he wants to do a lot more than “go after” them; I also am certain t most Presidents have dark fantasies about what they’d like to do to their foes. Trump is just the only one to say them out loud. Kelly let Christie get away with this nonsense.

5. One of the most quoted segments of the debate was when Ramaswamy ridiculed Nikki Haley, after she and DeSantis had emitted loose talk about involving the U.S. more deeply in both the Ukraine and Middle East conflicts, by saying “she has no idea what the hell the names of those [Ukraine] provinces are, but she wants to send our sons and daughters and our troops and our military equipment to go fight it.” First, that kind of “gotcha!” tactic is disgusting: who cares if a President knows the names of a foreign nation’s provinces? Second, Haley is a terrible actress: she looked like she was humiliated and wanted to crawl under the rug while Vivek was blathering. It was a time for an aspiring leader to look defiant, and for her face to say, “What an asshole!” and not, “Oh no! He got me!”

6. Name-calling. Again, as in the last debate when Haley called Ramaswamy “scum,” debaters descended in to ad hominem attacks. Christie said “This is the fourth debate, the fourth debate that you would be voted in the first 20 minutes as the most obnoxious blowhard in America. So shut up for a little while.” Nice. (There are many who would be ahead of Vivek if there was such a vote, since most American still haven’t heard of him.) Then Ramaswamy retorted by mocking Christie’s girth: “So do everybody a favor, just walk yourself off that stage, enjoy a nice meal and get the hell out this place.” A bit later, Christie called him a “smart-ass.”

Heck, if that’s the kind of rhetoric voters want, why wouldn’t they vote for Donald Trump?

7. Back to Christie: later he got another chance to explain his discovered animus toward Donald Trump, and the Trump-haters loved it. CNN dug up a debate expert who pronounced Christie’s “Retribution Speech” as “The finest speech ever given in a presidential debate.” That’s fascinating: the “greatest speech” was premised on a deliberate misinterpretation of Trump’s off-hand remark that he would only be “‘dictatorial” on “Day One” while naming one act that had to be done under statutory limits, and another (“Drilling, drilling, drilling”) that he couldn’t order anyone to do. The debate expert, Todd Graham, loved Christie’s speech because it attacked Trump. “Do I think he was kidding when he said he was a dictator?” Christie said. “All you have to do is look at the history…” Wait…why not look at Trump’s history? He was far less autocratic as President than his successor has been, indeed less autocratic than many Presidents. Christie raved about his first term. Is blatant hypocrisy great debating? As Johnny Carson used to say, “I did not know that!”

8. The most notable speech during the debate was not Christie’s but this from Vivek:

Why am I the only person on the stage at least who can say that January 6th now does look like it was an inside job, that the government lied to us for 20 years about Saudi Arabia’s involvement in 9/11, that the great replacement theory is not some grand right-wing conspiracy theory, but a basic statement of the Democratic Party’s platform, that the 2020 election was indeed stolen by big tech, that the 2016 election, the one that Trump won for sure, was also one that was stolen from him by the National Security Establishment that actually put out the Trump Russia collusion hoax that they knew was false?

Of course the mainstream media’s collective heads exploded. Obama acolyte Van Jones flipped out, calling it a Nazi speech because of the reference to “the Great Replacement” theory, which anyone can prove within 20 minutes on Google was openly endorsed by progressives and Democrats more than a decade ago as their guaranteed, fail-safe route to one-party rule. “Demographics is destiny!” they said. The funny thing is that the theory was and is dead, dead, wrong. Color and ethnicity don’t matter: the longer a group marinates in American values, the less progressive it gets, the more patriotic, and the more practical. We are already seeing this process among Hispanic-Americans. The “inside job” claim is weak, but Ramaswamy’s characterizations of the 2016 and 2020 elections are solid.

9. Finally, I have to comment on the answers the candidates gave to the late question of which past President they would they “draw inspiration from for your own presidency and why?”

Christie was lucky enough to go first, and astute enough to make the obvious choice for a GOP candidate, Ronald Reagan, the last wholly successful and popular POTUS the party has produced. This left the other candidates with either a “me too!” option or a lesser one. Haley pandered to the ignorant by picking the two greatest U.S. Presidents, Washington and Lincoln, neither of which held the office in periods remotely similar to the current one. Washington had to invent the office, and Lincoln was a wartime President his entire term. DeSantis pandered to a different group, the far Right minimal government fan club, members of whom often cite Coolidge as a god because “silent Cal knew the proper role of the federal government” and “the country was in great shape when he was President.” Yeah, while he was President, but just a year after Silent Cal left office the economy crashed, in great part because of Coolidge’s hands-off approach to the economy and financial markets. Poor Herbert Hoover was left “holding the bag.” (Some even believe that Coolidge declined to run for another term because he suspected something bad was coming.) Moreover, DeSantis has wielded executive power with aggressiveness and gusto as governor: he’s nothing like Coolidge. Why would anyone believe that he would be a minimalist as President, with more power at his disposal?

Finally, Vivek Ramaswamy chose Thomas Jefferson, a safe choice assuming the average American knows little about his Presidency. Ramaswamy cited Jefferson’s passionate belief in freedom of speech: I assume he knows that James Madison and George Mason were responsible for the free speech rights in the Constitution, not Jefferson. Does he know that as President, Jefferson became so outraged at the press’s attacks on his policies and character that he instructed state attorneys generals to indict some of the more vituperative journalists? Does he know that Jefferson wanted his old foe Aaron Burr convicted of treason when there was little evidence to support that charge? Never mind: Vivek knew he couldn’t go wrong naming one of the Mt. Rushmore figures, and that the U.S. education system produces citizens who know Thomas Jefferson held slaves and little else.

The transcript is here.