I couldn’t watch last night’s debate because CNBC allowed online access only to those who were cable TV subscribers. I did follow some live blogs that covered it and it seemed to be pretty chaotic, light on substance, and heavy on attacks on the media. What everyone seemed to be agreed upon is that the debate moderators were terrible.

Tessa Stuart lists what she describes as 21 hilarious moments from it.

The third Republican debate took place Wednesday evening at the Coors Event Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder. It felt long — so long that our entire lives flashed before our eyes, and by the end of it we were walking with our five grandkids through the charred remains of America with the voice of Mike Huckabee echoing somewhere in the distance. By the end of it, the only thing we needed to hear was that Donald Trump had convinced CNBC to limit it from going any longer, and we were ready to elect him our benevolent dictator for life.

Kevin Drum lists some of the major flat-out falsehoods.

Josh Marshall writes that Carly Fiorina got the most speaking time and that Jeb Bush got the least, even less than the bottom feeders in the polls, and that is at least one reason why the GOP establishment is furious with the debate moderators. But he said that the attacks on the CNBC moderators for having a liberal bias was odd because CNBC is pretty much a mouthpiece for Wall Street

But as I reflect on the debate a bit more I think a big reason the debate was so weird was that so many of the questions were based on obscurantist and myopic CNBC nonsense – which is not only far-right and identified with great wealth but specifically owned by the bubble of Wall Street. That led to a lot of odd questions – like Jim Cramer’s saying why aren’t GM execs going to jail, Santelli’s wild questions or that question about fantasy football. Lots of people are into fantasy football. But whether it’s betting and whether it should be regulated, that’s a Wall Streeter question – in the same way huge amounts of the money that gets pushed through political betting sites comes off Wall Street. It’s hard for Republicans to say this. But I think this is a significant reason why the debate seemed so odd. And it made it kind of odd to hear anti-liberal bias attacks on the moderators when they were asking questions like shouldn’t the Fed be forced to take us back to the gold standard.

How many more of these theater of the absurd events are there?