Last night's GOP debate left Americans feeling like they were waiting for Godot with no exit in sight, but that doesn't mean there weren't occasional moments of interest, as when the candidates got snippy and started personally attacking each other.
Because the alternative was fact-checking the baseless claims made and endorsed by the candidates, we here at Salon started keeping track of those attacks, just to assess the current state of vitriol in the Republican party. Not surprisingly, the majority of attacks involved a certain loud-mouthed real estate tycoon, as demonstrated by this handy graphic:
- Donald Trump on Rand Paul: "Well, first of all, Rand Paul shouldn’t even be on this stage. He’s number 11, he’s got 1 percent in the polls, and how he got up here, there’s far too many people anyway."
- Rand Paul on Donald Trump: "Do we want someone with that kind of character, that kind of careless language to be negotiating with Putin? Do we want someone like that to be negotiating with Iran?"
- Scott Walker on Donald Trump: "Mr. Trump, we don’t need an apprentice in the White House."
- Donald Trump on Scott Walker: "...you were supposed to make a billion dollars in the state. You lost 2.2 — you have right now, a huge budget deficit. That’s not a Democratic point. That’s a point. That’s a fact. And when the people of Iowa found that out, I went to No. 1 and you went down the tubes."
- Jeb Bush on Donald Trump: "When Donald Trump talks about judgment, what was his position on who would’ve been the best negotiator to deal with Iran? It wasn’t a Republican; it was Hillary Clinton. That’s what you believe. I mean, the lack of judgment and the lack of understanding about how the world works is really dangerous in this kind of time that we’re saying."
- Donald Trump on Jeb Bush: "He’s weak on immigration — by the way, in favor of Common Core, which is also a disaster, but weak on immigration. He doesn’t get my vote."
- Donald Trump on Carly Fiorina: "When Carly says the revenues went up, that’s because she bought Compaq, it was a terrible deal, and it really led to the destruction of the company. Now one other company before that was Lucent. Carly was at Lucent before that. And Lucent turned out to be a catastrophe also. So I only say this. She can’t run any of my companies. That I can tell you."
- Carly Fiorina on Donald Trump: "You ran up mountains of debt, as well as losses, using other people’s money, and you were forced to file for bankruptcy not once, not twice, four times, a record four times. Why should we trust you to manage the finances of this nation any differently than you managed the finances of your casinos?"
- Chris Christie on Carly Fiorina and Donald Trump: "Let’s start talking about those issues tonight and stop this childish back-and-forth between the two of you."
- Donald Trump on Marco Rubio: "Well, you have to understand, I am not sitting in the United States Senate with, by the way, the worst voting record there is today. Number one. I am not sitting in the United States Senate."
- Rand Paul on Jeb Bush: "There is at least one prominent example on the stage of someone who says they smoked pot in high school, and yet the people going to jail for this are poor people, often African-Americans and often Hispanics, and yet the rich kids who use drugs aren’t."
- Jeb Bush on Ted Cruz: "So, you can rewrite history, I guess, Ted, but the simple fact is that you supported [John Roberts] because he had all the criteria that you would have thought would have made a great justice. And, I think he is doing a good job."
- Rand Paul on Chris Christie: "Governor Christie would go into Colorado, and if you’re breaking any federal law on marijuana, even though the state law allows it, he would put you in jail."
- Chris Christie on Rand Paul: "And Senator Paul knows that that’s simply not the truth. In New Jersey, we have medical marijuana laws, which I supported and implemented. This is not medical marijuana."
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