A routine day on the election front

Within microseconds of the report that Justice Antonin Scalia had died you could hear crackling bursts of jerking knees from the six dwarfs  vying for the Republican presidential ring.  Each tried to engage the hyper-conservative South Carolina audience with a brief, hastily gathered tribute to the fallen justice, mostly repeating the others' mournful words as respectful American mortals  grasping  the coattails of one of their earlier heroes,  Ronald Reagan.    But it hardly rose to the classic poetry  of Mark  Antony's paean to Julius Caesar in an appeal for a loan of Roman ears.

Indeed, from that impromptu  point on, the debate stopped just short of fisticuffs in which there were few moments  when somebody wasn't making a damn fool of himself.  As such, it was hard to  shift the harsh story line to the paid commercials in which a constipation cure interrupted the breakdown of sanity. (When I hear some of these guys, I recall the warning of Adlai Stevenson: "In America, anybody can become president.  That's one of the risks you take.")

Ohio's Gov.Kasich, who  is craving to be the newly honed adult in the GOP platoon,  gasped with  a pained smile:  "I gotta tell you.  This is just crazy, huh?  This is just nuts, OK?  Jeez. Oh, man." But even he fell into lockstep  with the  script that President Obama should not, for God's sake, nominate a successor to Scalia.  Cruz later said he would "absolutely" filibuster any move in that direction by the president  Obama. "

Here we go again.

None of this would qualify as anything but one more stonewall that has been raised by Obama's Republican enemies since he entered  office more than seven years ago.   But it will rise well above an annoyance  in the coming months with the contenders on the right  continuing to kick up rocks and mortar to strip a twice elected president of his constitutional right.

The Senate races, including the one in  Ohio, have risen to towering importance for the Democrats;  The country has too many enemies around the world to have to put up with this ad hoc batch of white collar Republicans.

Oh, a couple of takeaways:  Rubio asserted  Bush "kept America safe."  The night before, Ana Navarro, a CNN contributor and Jeb! supporter, became angry on the Bill Maher show when Dubya  was criticized by some others for the high human cost of the Iraq war.  Her defense:  George had been quite helpful in providing for the returning wounded veterans.

Please.