Courtesy of an overeager fan’s opening acoustic rendition of how much Republicans love themselves, last Wednesday’s Republican debate was a song and dance from the get.

Curious about this debate was its relative lack of one. Perhaps this is more of a symptom of professional politics in general, but last Wednesday’s showing was less of an exhibition of prospective policy and more of a pageant of the bombastic. Aside from the cloying attempts of CNN to broach the generation gap between the voting youth and voted officials by staging debate questions through grainy and out-of-sync YouTube clips, the Republican debate was reminiscent of a fourth grade class election, with McCain and Giuliani handing out homemade buttons, Tom Tancredo resolving to put chocolate milk in the water fountains and Huckabee reminding the teacher she hadn’t given a test in awhile. One half expected Mitt Romney to promise a ‘no new homework’ bill for the American working class.

The vox populi did manage to field some tough questions ‘ questions of the modern relevance of the Confederate flag and why oh why Rudy rooted for the Sox back in October.

We’ve got the ominous harbingers of recession looming overhead, we’re in the midst of a housing foreclosure crisis that threatens to displace entire communities, 40-odd million citizens are sans health coverage and the better part of the Eastern hemisphere is calling for our dissolution, and here we have fans of the Republican party lobbing softballs at podiums better equipped for a tee ball game than the most important election in eight years.

Spectacle as it was, the debate’s set-up did little to abate the circus sideshow from gaining speed about 20 minutes into topics of gun control, or rather, the supreme and inalienable right to a lack thereof.

The absolutism surrounding Second Amendment rights seemed the only item that all 84 candidates could sleep in the same room with, Hunter going so far as to awkwardly identify with soldiers in Iraq, safety mongers and Charlton Heston enthusiasts everywhere in one fluid moment.

This G.O.P interpretation of Sylvester Stallone’s ‘Over the Top’ doesn’t stop with guns ‘ all of the candidates deferred to some kind of policy of inclusion and belligerence or another in varying degrees throughout the night.

Romney says he’d like to double the size of the Guantanamo prison. Tom Tancredo of Colorado wants to stop all immigration in general, legal and illegal (‘too much immigration brings problems,’ among other things, ‘it makes it difficult for us to assimilate’).

Romney went on to accuse Rudy Giuliani of running a ‘sanctuary city’ while Rudy accused Mitt of running a ‘sanctuary mansion,’ thanks to the illegal immigrants who were grooming his lawn.

Ironically enough, reports surfaced Tuesday that Romney had fired a landscaper from his suburban Boston home after learning about undocumented workers laboring on the property. It was actually the second time he was presented with such intel.

The former Massachusetts governor has made combating illegal immigration a core theme of his White House run, a glorious triumvirate of a plan that includes building fences along the U.S.-Mexico border, developing a tamperproof ID card so only legal immigrants can work and cutting off federal money to ‘sanctuary cities’ he says provides safe haven to illegal immigrants.

Uncanny.

Surprisingly, though, little mention was made about the ever-dubious war in Iraq, possibly the greatest foreign policy debacle in national history.

What seems to be the real issue, and what is most disquieting, is not the ludicrous perspective this crop of candidates espouse, but rather that one of them is going to be nominated for president.

So what have we learned? Fred Thomson is able to stay awake for at least an hour, Ron Paul is a terrifying, terrifying man, but the slim prospect of an interspecies run-off between him and Dennis Kucinich is something to pull for, and the Yankees will never win another World Series as long as Rudy is out of office. In the wake of the debate, these are the only things that are certain, and they’re about as viable as the questions we asked.