10 WTF Moments From the Fifth GOP Debate

1. Jeb Bush and Donald Trump Fight to the Death

Bush: “So Donald, you know, is great at — at the one-liners, but he’s a chaos candidate. And he’d be a chaos president.” 

Jeb Bush’s campaign is flailing, and he believes attacking frontrunner Donald Trump is his only shot at clawing his way back to the top. He is utterly disgusted with Trump’s rise — and who can blame him?

On Tuesday night Bush said Trump lacked seriousness, and his approach to beating ISIS was “just crazy.” And Trump’s response — as always — was that he’s beating Bush in the polls. “He said that very simply because he has failed in this campaign,” Trump pointed out, correctly. “It’s been a total disaster.”

And for that, Jeb doesn’t have a comeback.

2. John Kasich Wanted to Change the Paris Talks’ Agenda

Kasich: “And when I see they have a climate conference over in Paris, they should have been talking about destroying ISIS because they are involved in virtually every country, you know, across this world.” 

Nearly 200 nations just signed a historic accord to fight climate change, a global challenge that has the power to devastate every country on the planet. On a stage full of global warming deniers, John Kasich, who likes to present himself as the serious candidate, said we should have canceled the Paris talks — years in the planning and execution — and replaced it with a conference to discuss ISIS.

It was an idea so crazy it could have come from Donald Trump.

3. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio Go at Each Other’s Throats

Cruz: “…they are knowingly false and they are, in fact, Alinsky-like attacks like Barack Obama.”

While Bush is trying to jump about five places in line by going directly after Trump, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz know they have the best shots at knocking the frontrunner off his perch. But first each has to beat the other.

They hit each other multiple times tonight, but the defining moment was an early sparring over surveillance: Cruz voted for the renewal of the Patriot Act that eliminated the metadata collection program; Rubio voted for it. What mattered wasn’t their positions — they’re both in favor of surveilling the American people to an uncomfortable degree — but Cruz’s assertion that Rubio was lying about both the bill and Cruz’s position. He would do that throughout the night. 

4. Yes, Donald Trump Really Wants to Shut Down Parts of the Internet

Trump: “What I wanted to do is I wanted to get our brilliant people from Silicon Valley and other places and figure out a way that ISIS cannot do what they’re doing.”

Trump literally wants to shut down parts of the Internet to defeat ISIS. Let’s ignore the part where that actually makes it tougher to track what terrorists want to do. Let’s ignore the gross violation of the First Amendment. 

Let’s instead talk about how Donald Trump thinks the Internet is a magic room full of on/off switches, some of which are labeled THE PART THAT ISIS IS USING. Speaking of magic plans to defeat ISIS…

5. Ted Cruz Wants to Use Magic Bombs to Kill ISIS Dead

Cruz: “You would carpet bomb where ISIS is, not a city, but the location of the troops.”

CNN’s Wolf Blitzer pushed Cruz to answer whether he would “carpet bomb” the ISIS capital of Raqqa, which is still home to hundreds of thousands of civilians (in case you were wondering where refugees come from), and Cruz insisted he would only carpet bomb ISIS troops, not the city….

…the same city full of ISIS troops. Maybe he’ll use magic carpet bombs that somehow distinguish between good guys and bad guys.

6. Donald Trump Will Murder Terrorists’ Families