In what had to rank as the worst presidential debate in modern history, CNBC anchors berated, cut off, and skewed the words of all the Republican candidates over the course of two absolutely stultifying hours on Wednesday night. In spite of, and in the case of, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz and Chris Christie, because of that terrible moderation, Republicans emerged looking better for wear. They needed to show they had elbows, and many of them did. So, without further ado, here are the third Republican Debates Grades: Donald Trump gets a B. Ben Carson gets a C. Marco Rubio gets an A. Ted Cruz had the best moment of the entire night. Rand Paul gets a D. Jeb Bush gets an F. And Rand Paul was the unkindest of the last debate. There's no place better to go to go down in the polls than to vote for Rand Paul, but there's no doubt that Rand's campaign had a night to forget it, too. And he did it in the worst way possible, which is a good thing, because Rand Paul's campaign did not even bother to mention that he's running for president in this debate. And that's not even close to being the worst of the three debates I've ever seen in a primary debate, let alone the worst one I've been in a presidential debate, and I'm not even joking about it. I think we'll all agree that Rand Paul needs to do better than he did last night, and that's a good night for his campaign needs to be much better than it was last night. -- and he did a good job of explaining why he should win the primary debates he's been in the past two months. in a way that we've seen in the last two debates, and we can all agree he deserves a shot at being the best of his chances to be the next one in the next primary debates in 2020, not the last one. I hope you agree with me that he did that in a major primary debate in 2020. ...and that's why Rand Paul should be the best in the primary debate I've seen so far so far, right here in this past week, right there in Iowa, in Iowa and in New Hampshire, in South Carolina, in New York, in fact, in Las Vegas, in Chicago, in San Francisco, in Los Angeles, New York City, in Atlanta, New Jersey, in Boston, and so on, in Baltimore, New Mexico, etc.
00:00:00.000In what had to rank as the worst presidential debate in modern history, CNBC anchors berated, cut off, and skewed the words of all the Republican candidates over the course of two absolutely stultifying hours on Wednesday night.
00:00:13.000In spite of, and in the case of Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz and Chris Christie,
00:00:17.000Because of that terrible moderation, Republicans actually emerged looking better for wear.
00:00:23.000They needed to show they had elbows, and many of them did.
00:00:25.000So, without further ado, here are the third Republican debate grades.
00:00:30.000Donald Trump gets a B. In the run-up to the debate, I said that Trump actually needed to stay away from attacking the other candidates, and actually, he basically did.
00:00:38.000The only time that he went after anybody else is when an aggressively nasty John Kasich
00:00:43.000And Trump did a great job of going after the media.
00:00:52.000I've been saying for months, for years actually, that going after the media is the best path to victory for Republicans.
00:00:58.000His final riposte against the CNBC powers that be, in which he bragged about forcing them to reduce the length of the debate to two hours, was classic.
00:01:07.000The only reason Trump got a B, rather than an A, was because he was caught red-handed in a lie about his position on H-1B visas.
00:01:14.000It became clear Trump hadn't even read his own immigration plan, or if he did, he didn't know it well enough for a debate.
00:01:36.000Occasionally, he gets off a strong note.
00:01:38.000Whenever he talks about social issues, Carson is great.
00:01:40.000But every time he's not talking about social issues, he looks weak.
00:01:43.000He even acknowledged that his weakness, his personal weakness, could be his own inability to consider himself a presidential candidate, which seems a pretty fair summation.
00:02:03.000He labeled the media the Democratic Party's super PAC.
00:02:05.000It was a terrific moment, and it was a moment underscored by Hillary's lackeys at CNBC attacking him the entire debate with discredited talking point after discredited talking point.
00:02:51.000Ted Cruz said that the questions asked by the idiotic moderators, quote, illustrate why the American people don't trust the media.
00:02:57.000He then said this is not a cage match.
00:03:00.000He said the debate between Democrats was a debate between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, and he contrasted the media treatment of Republicans with media treatment of Democrats.
00:03:08.000He said where every fawning question from the media was which one of you is more handsome and wise.
00:03:13.000Cruz then pointed out that none of these members of the media would be voting in Republican primaries.
00:03:18.000Cruz needed to be aggressive after a couple of passive debates, and he was, in a very big way.
00:03:23.000Frank Luntz, who I don't tend to like, his focus group, though, rated that 98%, that moment for Ted Cruz.
00:03:29.000It basically muted the television for the next few minutes.
00:04:27.000If you were a member of the Colorado Public Smoking Pot, you could be forgiven for missing his presence.
00:04:32.000He vowed to filibuster the new budget deal, which looked like a desperation play and didn't even land with the heavily conservative audience.
00:04:38.000Rand Paul will be dropping out of the race momentarily.
00:05:01.000He told the idiotic John Harwood that John Harwood was rude even by New Jersey standards, which was a great line.
00:05:06.000He even scored on entitlement reform, and he appeared to be actually good-natured with his colleagues, which is totally at odds with his normal persona.
00:06:15.000I'm Ben Shapiro and this is The Ben Shapiro Show.
00:06:23.000Alrighty, so, it is the day after the third Republican presidential debate.
00:06:27.000If I look tired, it's because I made a big sacrifice for all of you people.
00:06:30.000And if it sounds like I resent you, it's because I do.
00:06:33.000I wasted three hours of my time watching that inane bullsh- Okay, so, here's what I thought after watching that inane BS.
00:06:43.000There's a good side and there's the bad side.
00:06:45.000The bad side is that CNBC is a disaster area, as we'll get to in a moment.
00:06:48.000Reince Priebus should be fired for allowing this kind of debate to occur.
00:06:51.000The good side is that this debate was an acid test.
00:06:54.000What I mean by that is that it made clear very quickly who belongs on the stage and who does not.
00:06:59.000Because the truth is, and this has always been the truth and I've been saying it for years if you've been a fan of mine, if you listen to the podcast, if you listen to my radio shows, you know, I believe the true enemy of the Republicans are the media.
00:07:14.000And the media proved last night that they're the enemy, and if Republicans want to win in 2016, they don't just need to out-compete Hillary Clinton, they need to find some sort of way to smack the media as hard in the face as often as humanly possible.
00:07:29.000All he had to do was watch John Harwood.
00:07:30.000John Harwood is a big Hillary Clinton fan, and John Harwood... I mean, there are no clean words, non-four-letter words, that I can say about John Harwood that are perfectly appropriate for who this guy is.
00:07:42.000I mean, he is just... He was awful last night.
00:07:47.000There's no way he should have been anywhere near a debate stage.
00:07:49.000He certainly shouldn't have been a moderator.
00:07:51.000It angers me simply because whenever people lie, it makes me upset, and when you lie and say you're an objective person, it makes me annoyed.
00:08:25.000If Donald Trump had found an excuse to hit John Harwood physically with the podium, Donald Trump not only would have been elected president, he would have been appointed king.
00:08:33.000Here is John Harwood last night on CNBC.
00:08:36.000When you came into office with a budget surplus in the state of Louisiana, now years later, the state legislature faced a $1.6 billion budget gap and the Republican state treasurer called one of your approaches to that problem, nonsense on a stick, quoting him.
00:08:53.000Are you going to do for the federal budget what you did for the Louisiana budget?
00:08:56.000If you're a young student here, you've not seen a robust American economy.
00:08:59.000But Governor Jindal, as you know, many Republicans are opposed to the approach that you've taken in Louisiana.
00:09:05.000They complain that you have tried so hard to avoid anything that could be called a tax increase so that you could run for president saying you'd never raise taxes.
00:09:15.000You've had the worst economic recovery since the Great Depression.
00:09:19.000So you see John Harwood there, and those points that he's using right there about the budget gap are completely discredited.
00:11:23.000I talked to economic advisors who have served presidents of both parties.
00:11:28.000They said that you have as much chance of cutting taxes that much without increasing the deficit as you would of flying away from that podium by flapping your arms as a preacher as well as a politician.
00:11:46.000Because it's not a question, it's a rhetorical question.
00:11:48.000This is a comic book, if it were a comic book version of a presidency, Trump immediately would have leapt the podium, grabbed him like the Hulk, and torn him bodily asunder.
00:11:58.000Okay, but the fact, and then he asks that question, the question that he asks to Marco Rubio there about tax, about his tax plan, saying that it would have given more money to rich people than poor people.
00:12:07.000Not only is John Harwood factually wrong, not only is he factually wrong, he tweeted that out several weeks ago and had to correct himself already several weeks ago on Twitter.
00:12:17.000And then he comes back with the original claim that he already corrected himself on Twitter.
00:12:22.000The Tax Foundation, which is this non-profit group, they came out and said that John Harwood got it wrong last night.
00:12:27.000This morning, on Twitter, John Harwood was tripling down on it.
00:12:30.000Okay, I mean, this is how bad the moderator, and it wasn't just John Harwood, I mean, he was the worst of them.
00:12:34.000Betsy Quick, or Becky Quick, she was terrible.
00:12:37.000Carl Quintanilla was awful all the way through.
00:12:40.000Their questions, question after question after question, was just an attack upon an attack upon an attack.
00:12:45.000All of this was awful and demonstrates how truly, egregiously bad the media are and how biased they are and how terrible they are, but it set up Ted Cruz for a very big moment.
00:12:55.000Ted Cruz, after basically going missing in action for the first 20 minutes while the moderators ask everybody else questions, Ted's kind of sitting on one end of the stage, the senator from Texas.
00:13:04.000And finally they get to him and they ask him a question about why he would shut down the government, right?
00:14:29.000have more ideas, more experience, more common sense than every participant in the Democratic debate.
00:14:36.000That debate reflected a debate between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks.
00:14:43.000And nobody watching at home believes that any of the moderators has any intention of voting in a Republican primary.
00:14:51.000The questions that are being asked shouldn't be trying to get people to tear into each other.
00:14:56.000It should be, what are your substantive solutions to people... I just want the record to reflect that I asked you about the debt limit and I got no answer.
00:15:13.000So you don't actually want to hear the answer?
00:15:15.000Okay, so, you can see, number one, Ted hits them exactly where they live, and you can see that Carl Quintanilla, who's the guy asking the question there, he gets very upset.
00:15:34.000Because Ted has punctured his sort of balloon of his persona of objectivity.
00:15:44.000We're not going to answer the question.
00:15:46.000I went to school with all these people like this at UCLA and Harvard Law School, where the minute that you question their motivations by proclaiming the truth about their motivations, they get very huffy.
00:15:55.000And the huffiness, the kind of clutching of the pearls that Carl Quintanilla does there.
00:15:59.000Well, you know, I guess you just don't want to answer the question.
00:16:01.000Then Cruz says, fine, I'm happy to answer the question.
00:16:03.000And what Cruz was going to say is the way you phrased the question was to make it seem like I want to shut down the government when the president of the United States wants to shut down the government in order to preserve a blowout budget, right?
00:16:58.000And they wanted to cut off Ronald Reagan's microphone, and he had actually paid for it, and he said, Mr. Breen, I paid for this microphone.
00:17:05.000Imagistic moments like this is what Republicans have to understand.
00:17:08.000The policy wonkishness of Marco Rubio, or the smoothness of Carly Fiorina, or the ability to speak in detail about drone proposals from Rand Paul, none of that makes one bit of difference.
00:17:22.000This is why Donald Trump is still winning, by the way.
00:18:21.000Ben Carson, who didn't attack the media too much last night, he came out after the debate and he said he's getting sick and tired of this debate strategy.
00:18:28.000He says he's sick and tired of the media bias here, as Ben Carson, who did not perform particularly well last night, but at least has enough wherewithal to understand that the battle is just as much against the left media as it is against the Democratic Party.
00:18:40.000Well, I think they obviously had an agenda, and when I compare them to the kind of questions that were asked of the Democrats in their debate, the difference is night and day.
00:18:53.000But the thing that was really encouraging to me is that the audience was able to pick up on the bias, and they were able to act accordingly.
00:19:02.000And I hope some of the media is starting to recognize this, because as you know, I have been quite critical of the media.
00:19:50.000So Cruz was one big winner last night.
00:19:52.000Another big winner last night was Marco Rubio.
00:19:55.000And there was a point at which Marco Rubio scolded the media.
00:19:58.000And here's what it sounded like when Marco Rubio went after the media yesterday.
00:20:04.000Democrats have the ultimate superpacket called the mainstream media.
00:20:08.000Whoever's seen it... And I'll tell you why.
00:20:12.000Last week, Hillary Clinton went before a committee.
00:20:15.000She admitted she had sent emails to her family saying, hey, this attack in Benghazi was caused by Al-Qaeda-like elements.
00:20:22.000She spent over a week telling the families of those victims and the American people that it was because of a video.
00:20:28.000And yet the mainstream media is going around saying it was the greatest week in Hillary Clinton's campaign.
00:20:32.000It was the week she got exposed as a liar.
00:20:34.000It was the week that she got exposed as a liar in Benghazi.
00:20:38.000But she has her super PAC helping her out, the American mainstream media.
00:20:43.000And of course, he's exactly right, too.
00:20:44.000It turned into a beat-up-the-media-fest, and what made that kind of entertaining after a certain point, because I'm a sadist, is because the media absolutely deserve every moment of this, even when they ask legit questions.
00:20:55.000And late in the debate, they actually got some legit questions.
00:20:58.000Nobody took the questions seriously, because after all, we know that the media are lying in order to protect their favored candidates.
00:21:09.000And it started right from the very beginning.
00:21:11.000Donald Trump, first of all, I have to say, I follow these debates and I live blog them over at DailyWire.com and I tweet about them and you can follow me at Ben Shapiro if you aren't already.
00:21:22.000And I tweet out kind of campaign lookalikes just for fun before the debates.
00:21:27.000And Trump, I tweeted a picture of Trump and then a picture of a very, very fat lion.
00:21:34.000I mean, he's just kind of like, he's not a full-on roaring in-his-youth lion.
00:21:39.000He's sort of a guy who sits there, and he paws at the air, and then every so often, if you really poke him, then he eats your face.
00:21:46.000And yesterday, John Kasich of Ohio, who's a blustering, bloviating idiot, John Kasich went after Donald Trump, and Donald Trump took John Kasich's face and gave him a swaddling.
00:22:12.000Well, I mean right here to talk about we're just going to have a 10% tithe and that's how we're going to fund the government and we're not we're going to just fix everything with waste, fraud and abuse.
00:24:00.000It should actually be the tagline of his movie.
00:24:02.000It should be, Trump, he never forgives.
00:24:07.000You crossed him once, he won't be crossed again.
00:24:09.000It's just—which also, by the way, is the slogan for The Passion, too.
00:24:13.000But Trump, he had a couple of other good moments in the debate.
00:24:19.000At the very end, he really smacked CNBC incredibly hard.
00:24:22.000He said that he should be elected because he wins, and the way that you know that he wins is because Donald Trump convinced CNBC to drop an hour.
00:24:30.000From the debate, and because they dropped an hour from the debate, everybody can go home and finish with this nonsense.
00:24:37.000It was very good stuff from Donald Trump.
00:24:39.000He's also, I mean, he's just great on TV.
00:24:40.000I mean, whatever else you have to say about Trump, and when you see him doing it, you can't see it, folks, if you're listening, which is why you should subscribe, but if you actually watch the video of Trump here, when he's ripping into Kasich, it's so wildly entertaining because he's making faces, his resting, there's a term my sisters use, and I can't,
00:24:58.000I'm not supposed to say bad words on this show.
00:25:00.000And it's really hard, because I know that I'm not on radio, so I really want to.
00:25:03.000But there's something that they call a resting B-face.
00:25:05.000And Lindsay knows what I'm talking about, right?
00:25:24.000If you bother me in any way, this is going to go ugly for everyone, right?
00:25:30.000His resting face is like... And it's just, it's phenomenal.
00:25:35.000And then when he breaks from that into, like when he's talking about Casey, he starts doing these little effeminate motions with his shoulders to characterize Casey.
00:25:49.000And this truly was a big moment, is Marco Rubio finishing off Jeb Bush.
00:25:52.000So Jeb Bush is basically, at this point, like Saul at the end of his tenure in the Bible, where he's standing on top of the hill and he's been grievously wounded from all sides, and he knows he's about to go down, and he turns to one of his spear carriers and he says, please, just finish me.
00:26:08.000And Jeb isn't quite asking for it, but he sort of is.
00:26:17.000Jeb Bush is a pansy masquerading as a bully.
00:26:20.000And so we've had a couple of situations in debate where Jeb Bush, who's a spoiled rich kid, I mean, that's what he is,
00:26:25.000I grew up with a lot of people who were spoiled rich kids.
00:26:28.000Believe it or not, folks, for all of the accounts of my wildly rich upbringing, I grew up in a house where we had one bathroom for four kids, and I shared a room with three of my sisters, one bedroom for all four of us.
00:26:38.000And, you know, I went to a private school where everybody had their own car, and this was a big deal to me, everybody had their own car, and the tuition was very high, and my parents were on financial aid, and all the rest of it.
00:26:48.000So I know what it's like to grow up with people who grow up, the sons and daughters of very wealthy people.
00:26:55.000And, you know, if you do a good job parenting, it's not a big deal.
00:26:57.000If you do a bad job parenting, then people who are the sons and daughters of wealthy people are some of the most obnoxious people in the world, because they feel entitled to everything.
00:27:05.000And they feel that if you ask them a legit question about anything they're doing, they don't have to deign to speak with you.
00:27:12.000There's a sort of just entitlement complex that accrues to these folks, and it just reeks off of Jeb Bush.
00:27:17.000When you watch Jeb Bush, it feels for everyone.
00:28:05.000Instead of doing what Ted Cruz does, which is smart, defending all the other candidates, Jeb Bush jumps on the bandwagon because he feels he has to pummel Rubio.
00:28:13.000And it goes very, very poorly for him.
00:28:15.000Because as I said, Rubio is a very good defensive fighter and Rubio can counterpunch.
00:28:19.000So he's not going to get a knockout, but he'll knock you down.
00:28:21.000And with Jeb Bush, Jeb has a glass jaw.
00:28:23.000So you hit him once and he goes down for the count.
00:28:25.000Here is Jeb Bush getting knocked out of the Republican presidential race by Marco Rubio.
00:28:36.000You've been a young man in a hurry ever since you won your first election in your 20s.
00:28:40.000You've had a big accomplishment in the Senate, an immigration bill providing a path to citizenship that conservatives in your party hate and even you don't support anymore.
00:28:49.000Now you're skipping more votes than any senator to run for president.
00:28:53.000Why not slow down, get a few more things done first, or at least finish what you start?
00:29:06.000We can't afford to have another four years like the last eight years.
00:29:09.000Watching this broadcast tonight are millions of people that are living paycheck to paycheck.
00:29:13.000They're working as hard as they ever have.
00:29:15.000Everything costs more, and they haven't had a raise in decades.
00:29:18.000You have small businesses in America that are struggling.
00:29:20.000For the first time in 35 years, we have more businesses closing than starting.
00:29:24.000We have a world that's out of control and has grown dangerous, and a president
00:29:28.000That is weakening our military and making our foreign policy unstable and unreliable in the eyes of our allies, and our adversaries continue to grow stronger.
00:29:35.000They say there's no bipartisanship in Washington?
00:29:38.000We have a $19 trillion bipartisan debt, and it continues to grow as we borrow money from countries that do not like us to pay for government we cannot afford.
00:29:51.000If we don't act now, we are going to be the first generation in American history that leaves our children worse off than ourselves.
00:29:58.000So when the Sun Sentinel says Rubio should resign, not rip us off, when they say Floridian sent you to Washington to do a job, when they say you act like you hate your job, do you?
00:30:09.000Yeah, let me say, I read that editorial today with a great amusement.
00:30:13.000It's actually evidence of the bias that exists in the American media today.
00:30:17.000Let me answer your question on the Sun Sentinel editorial today.
00:30:21.000Back in 2004, one of my predecessors to the Senate, by the name of Bob Graham, a Democrat, ran for president, missing over 30% of his votes.
00:30:28.000I don't recall them calling for his resignation.
00:30:58.000Because I'm a constituent of the senator, and I helped him, and I expected that he would do constituent service, which means that he shows up to work.
00:31:06.000He got endorsed by the Sun Sentinel because he was the most talented guy in the field.
00:31:35.000Over the last few weeks, I've listened to Jeb as he walked around the country and said that you're modeling your campaign after John McCain.
00:31:40.000That you're going to launch a furious comeback the way he did, by fighting hard in New Hampshire and places like that, carrying your own bag at the airport.
00:31:48.000You know how many votes John McCain missed when he was
00:31:50.000...that Fury's comeback that you're now modeling it under?
00:31:52.000He wasn't my... Now Jeb, I don't remember... Well, let me tell you, I don't remember you ever complaining about John McCain's vote record.
00:31:58.000The only reason why you're doing it now is because we're running for the same position and someone has convinced you that attacking me is going to help you.
00:32:03.000I've been... Here's the bottom line, I'm not... My campaign...
00:32:23.000That's delightful and and it's it's particularly delightful because if you actually folks you really need to subscribe so you can see the faces when people say these things because when you see the shot the difference in the face of Jeb Bush between the beginning of that clip and the end of that clip he goes from the smarmy smile to oh boy I just crapped my pants
00:32:40.000And it happens all in the space of about 45 seconds.
00:32:56.000And he got his lights knocked out right there.
00:32:59.000By the way, Eric Cantor, the guy who was just ousted, you remember he was the house majority whip, he was ousted in favor of Dave Brat in the primary in his own district.
00:33:29.000I also like the fact that all the Republican candidates had to respond to a hostile media because with the masks off, this is what the media are like.
00:33:36.000And they should understand this going forward.
00:33:49.000It's clear that the field is beginning to thin out.
00:33:52.000Ben Carson, for all of my love for many of the things that he said over the past few weeks, did not look good.
00:33:57.000I don't think that he has the mettle or the knowledge to stand up to the kind of presidential assault he'd be under if he were to head a general election.
00:34:04.000Marco Rubio obviously does his homework.
00:34:06.000Ted Cruz is constitutionally a fighter, and I don't mean U.S.
00:34:10.000Constitution, I mean like in terms of his own constitution, he is a fighter.
00:34:14.000And Donald Trump is a fat lion, and if you poke him hard enough, that fat lion will eat your face.
00:34:21.000And Donald Trump continues to prove that time and time again.
00:34:25.000This is going to come down to three candidates.
00:34:26.000It's going to be Trump, it's going to be the anti-Trump establishment guy, Rubio, and the anti-Trump conservative guy, and that's going to be Ted Cruz.
00:34:33.000And how it comes down at this point, anybody's guess, if I had to put money on it, I would say Rubio, although I don't like his immigration plan, that's not an endorsement of Rubio, that's just an assessment of the current political situation.
00:34:44.000This debate may have been more helpful than some of the others in weeding out some of the chaff from the wheat.
00:34:50.000And so thanks to CNBC for at least doing that.
00:34:53.000And also thanks to CNBC for making complete fools of themselves.
00:34:56.000Because anytime I can laugh at members of the mainstream media like John Harwood and Carl Quintanilla and Becky Quick, that makes me a happy camper.
00:35:04.000It almost makes up for the fact that I had to waste four hours of my life watching all you duds on national television last night.