GOP Myrtle Beach Bonanza! Er... Clip Show!

Whenever a show trots out a beach-themed episode, you know it's getting desperate for fresh ideas (The Brady Bunch: Hawaii Bound, Saved By the Bell: Hawaiian Style, etc.), but tonight, with what must by now be its several hundredth episode, the Republican Road Show outdid them all on the shores of South Carolina.

This evening's proceedings finally made it clear that, after the endless series of debates, forums, and roundtables, the candidates have said absolutely everything they have to say and (more surprisingly) the moderators have asked absolutely everything they have to ask.

With the exception of Ron Paul's ugly channeling of the far left nutroot community in his "Gulf of Tonkin" reference regarding the recent Iranian naval skirmish, I might've suspected Fox simpy re-cut footage from previous events.  No new questions, no new answers, to speak of.  Huckabee's one-liners were repeats.  McCain's timidly cowboyish fiscal rhetoric?  Heard it all at last week's debate.  Ron Paul's grotesque insanity?  Starting to get old.

Only in the begrudging interest of posterity, a few "highlights":

We kicked off with a more in-depth discussion of the mechanics and economic implications of fiscal and monetary policy than we've seen in a debate so far.  Rudy's new tax plan and the coming contest in economically struggling Michigan seemed to be the inspirations for the detailed discussion and I found it mildly refreshingly substantive (I heard some very good stuff from both Rudy and Mitt), but Ron Paul had to kill the whole segment by borrowing a bunch of the terms he'd just heard, then spinning them into a spittly, meandering fugue about economic causality that made so little sense, I imagine the idiocy of it likely infected the reasonable, important (if complex) economic deliberations we'd just heard from two well-tempered fiscal conservatives who possess that rarest of political talents of actually understanding how these things work.  If not for Paul's barminess on that topic, the debate would've been worthwhile, notwithstanding the rest of the night's relative worthlessness.

Speaking of America's favorite crackpot gynecologist, I was roughly 2/3 listening by the time he got to the end of his conspiracy-hawking, CIA-invoking, Gulf of Tonkin rant, so I'm not precisely certain what happened next.  The moderator threw it over to Mitt Romney, who responded that Paul ought to stop reading so many of Ahmadinejad's press releases.  This seemed to get a round of laughter/applause that was about halfway between polite and genuine, when it suddenly turned to loud boos.

Boos tend to make the highlight reels, so I expect we'll be hearing more about that, but I'm not sure whether I simply missed something - a follow-up bit of snark from one of the candidates, perhaps - or whether it was the contingent of Paulnuts in the audience whose job it was to scream like Beatles fans for his applause lines and hiss at his detractors.

Anyway, for more detailed discussion, check out this absolute monster of a thread over at Hot Air as well as their highglight reel.

Update:  Hey, hey.  Hot Air's got video of the Romney-Paul exchange discussed above.   The clip ends just before the booing started, but neither Mitt nor anyone else seemed to add anything I missed the first time around, so I assume the ensuing booing was indeed just the telltale moaning of Ron Paul's undead voting bloc.