THE REPUBLICAN RACE IS NOW BASICALLY JUST AN EPISODE OF THE O'REILLY FACTOR

Republicans have spent a couple of decades learning about politics from Bill O'Reilly, Michael Savage, and other rage addicts, and now they're getting a presidential race that sounds a lot like their favorite news sources:

[Donald] Trump appeared to unravel on stage Thursday evening before a crowd of roughly 1,500 in Fort Dodge, a small industrial town 100 miles northwest of Des Moines.

... s the speech dragged on, the applause came less often and grew softer. As Trump attacked Carson using deeply personal language, the audience grew quiet, a few shaking their heads. A man sitting in the back of the auditorium loudly gasped.

... Trump said he would go after the oil fields in Iraq and Syria that he says nets the terrorist group "millions of dollars a week."

"I would bomb the s--- out of them," he said to raucous applause....

The applause was nowhere near as strong as Trump launched into a lengthy critique of [Ben] Carson....

Trump said Carson has a "pathological disease" with no cure, comparing it to the incurable mental conditions of child molesters.

"A child molester, there's no cure for that," Trump said. "If you're a child molester, there's no cure. They can't stop you. Pathological? There's no cure."

With his voice growing louder and louder, Trump questioned what sort of person would attack his mother. He questioned how a belt buckle could stop a blade, stepping away from the podium to demonstrate how such an attack might happen and how his own belt buckle wouldn't stay in place long enough to stop a knife.

I don't know why I'm quoting from this at length -- you've probably already watched the amazing highlight reel from the speech:



(Can someone please do a dance remix of 0:24-0:45? I'd really enjoy that.)

And in case Trump hasn't made the race shouty enough, Carly Fiorina (who was referred to in Trump's Iowa speech as "Carly whatever-the-hell-her-name-is") decided to shout right back on Facebook:

Donald, sorry, I've got to interrupt again. You would know something about pathological. How was that meeting with Putin? Or Wharton? Or your self funded campaign? Anyone can turn a multi-million dollar inheritance into more money, but all the money in the world won't make you as smart as Ben Carson.

Carson, for his part, is not rising to the bait:

Ben Carson hopes Americans pray for Donald Trump after his GOP presidential rival compared him with child molesters.

“When I spoke with Dr. Carson about this yesterday [about] how we should respond, you know, he was so sad about it,” Armstrong Williams, Carson’s friend and business partner, told CNN Friday.

“He said: 'Pray for him,’ ” he said of Carson’s response. "He feels sorry because he really likes Mr. Trump. To see him just imploding before our very eyes -- it’s sad to watch.”

But Carson was absolutely livid a week ago when the press was questioning his accounts of his childhood and youth, as Charles Johnson noted at Little Green Footballs:

This press conference was the most awake I’ve seen Ben Carson in…. well, ever. I half expected him to pull out a hammer and go after that guy on his left who kept asking him the uncomfortable questions.

Don’t miss the section where he runs through a selection of choice anti-Obama conspiracy theories -- Frank Marshall Davis, Bernadine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright, sealed college records, etc. — in a voice that keeps getting higher and more querulous, like a child throwing a tantrum.

Missed this? Watch it. It's almost as unhinged as the Trump speech.



And Trump and Carson are leading every Republican poll.

But isn't it appropriate that angry and self-righteous candidates are leading the polls in party that gets most of its news this way?