…Bad as the night was for Mayor Mike, it’s unlikely to prove fatal. His billions will allow him to continue projecting a better image to voters, and there’s another debate next week. It’s not even clear if the predictable attacks against him will resonate. For every primary voter turned off by claims that Mr. Bloomberg is “buying” an election, another might gravitate to a candidate who promises to spend whatever it takes to beat Mr. Trump. For every Democrat offended by Mr. Bloomberg’s past comments, another may simply like that he hasa record—of running a major corporation and a city—in contrast to a gaggle of professional politicians.

Mr. Bloomberg’s bigger problem was the rest of the debate: the times he wasn’t under attack. When he was allowed to speak, he sounded like every other Democrat on the stage.

The Bloomberg team earlier this week put out a memo warning that Bernie Sanders was running away with the race and urging Mr. Biden, Mr. Buttigieg and Ms. Klobuchar to drop out and allow voters to consolidate around Mr. Bloomberg.

The memo irked his rivals, though it contained a basic truth: Mr. Sanders is rolling up the progressive vote, while the “centrist” lane of the party remains hopelessly divided.

Voters remain undecided in part because all those centrist candidates sound alike…”

By the time they decide, it will likely prove too late…at least too late to replace Bernie without the violence promised at the top of the page by the likes of Benjamin Dixon.

Next, writing at his Morning Jolt, Jim Geraghty opines on how it was…

Finally: A Debate Worth the Watch

“For the first time during all of these Democratic primary debates this cycle, I felt as if my voice and viewpoint were represented on stage Wednesday night. That’s not because Mike Bloomberg was present. That’s because I can’t stand most of these candidates, and last night, the candidates made clear they can’t stand each other either, either.

If you love to see Democratic candidates tearing into other Democratic candidates, the Las Vegas debate was joyous, beautiful, exciting, and wondrous. It was WrestleMania, it was Roman gladiators, it was a demolition derby. Don’t let anyone spin you; most of the candidates came out in worse shape than they entered. Tensions, frustrations, and outright disdain that simmered under the surface for almost an entire year exploded out into the open within the opening minutes. Many of the attacks carrying the not-so-hidden subtext: “My rivals are a bunch of unqualified idiots, and I cannot believe that the entire Democratic primary electorate hasn’t picked up on this yet.”

Mike Bloomberg got off to a catastrophically bad start. Michael Brendan Dougherty’s warnings were prescient, and Kevin Williamson wonders if Bloomberg’s campaign is effectively over, thanks to a “beyond incompetent” response to an entirely predictable series of questions about how he treated women who worked for him and his use of non-disclosure agreements.

Bloomberg LP has faced nearly 40 discrimination and harassment suits from 64 employees over the past two decades, with most of them accusing Bloomberg of “creating a culture of sexual harassment and degradation.”

Bloomberg’s response last night was, “none of them accuse me of doing anything other than maybe they didn’t like a joke I told.” You don’t get nearly 40 lawsuits from 64 employees over a mere bad joke.

The former mayor got a little better as the night went on and mostly bad debate performances can be wiped away with another $400 million or so in television ads. But the bottom line of last night is that Bloomberg is what his critics charge: a billionaire who’s been so used to running everything around him for so long that he freezes when someone challenges him and gets in his face. On top of that, he’s a cold fish. He radiates the warmth and empathy of the head of a DMV office. Bloomberg’s convinced he never did anything wrong regarding any of his female employees, and he can’t understand why anyone would think otherwise.

If you believe in such things, it’s as if fate, the universe, or the Gods of Politics decided to punish the Democrats yet again for the way they laughed at the GOP’s inability to stop Trump in the spring of 2016. The Democrats find themselves in a similar situation as the Republicans were four years ago: A populist septuagenarian, who only formally joined the party a few years ago, has jumped to an early lead, has a loyal base of diehard supporters, and is set to head into the convention with the most delegates because of the apportionment rules. The upstart disdains the party’s previous stances and leaders, promises to turn the country upside down, and casually alienates some of the party’s longtime supporters. But the establishment can’t unite behind one alternative candidate, risks a colossal fight at the convention, and is probably going to end up nominating someone at odds with its previous policies and values.

Instead of uniting quickly, the Democrats appear set to spend the next three or four months watching Sanders and Bloomberg pound the snot out of each other in a nasty, bitter, substantive, consequential, resource-devouring, personal fight.

This Democratic primary could not have turned out any better for President Trump…”

For those with the time, NRO‘s Kevin Williamson and Kyle Smith offer two excellent pieces of analysis as well.

Here’s the juice: Bloomberg did so poorly his campaign is already attempting to spin his performance with a doctored video. Problem is, even all Mike’s billions can’t edit every video out there:

Meanwhile, perhaps in a symbolic bow to the inevitable, Dimocrats are also already attempting to delegitimize The Donald’s second term:

Classified Intelligence Briefing Leaked to NYT to Get The Trump-Russia Hysterics Going Again

Moving on, the second-biggest loser in Wednesday’s debacle was the other mayor of even more dubious distinction, for, as FOX News reports, Pete has never shared either Mike’s wealth nor even his questionable credibility, as…

Buttigieg reportedly touted ‘partnerships’ with black-owned South Carolina businesses they denied having

“A new report alleges that former South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg touted “partnerships” with black-owned businesses in South Carolina that the business owners denied making.

Last week, Buttigieg penned an op-ed in a South Carolina newspaper “The State” promoting his “Frederick Douglass Plan,” which he describes is “a comprehensive investment in the empowerment of Black America” that was developed with the help of black activists and business leaders. “That begins with entrepreneurship, and our campaign has proudly partnered with local businesses like Diane’s Kitchen in Chester, Atlantis Restaurant in Moncks Corner and the Fair Deal Grocery on Charleston’s Eastside,” Buttigieg wrote.

However, according to ABC News, two of those businesses, Diane’s Kitchen and Atlantis Restaurant, said they “only remembered welcoming Buttigieg’s campaign as customers, not forging any sort of partnership with the candidate.” “I stand for what I stand for and I didn’t say I had a partnership,” Diane’s Kitchen owner, Diane Cole, told ABC News.

The report then alleges that the Buttigieg campaign attempted to “persuade” Cole into changing her position so that “it would more closely match the language Buttigieg used in his op-ed” in multiple messages after ABC News asked the campaign about Cole’s response.

“It sounds like you’re saying that I am your business partner. I’m only going to accept that you all stopped in while you were campaigning in South Carolina and I welcomed you all,” Cole told the campaign in one message…”

And you can add complete misrepresentations of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown to the list of Pete’s prevarications.  Coupled with his deliberate misinterpretation of Scripture, one can only conclude the former failed mayor is a…

Tucker offered this rather scathing summary of Buttgag’s over-orchestrated resumé, complete with the less-than-complimentary thoughts of Pete’s brother-in-law:

We’ll leave it to the grinning ghoul from Minnesota to summarize our thoughts on Pete’s prevaricating pastoral pronouncements:

Buttigieg is certainly the perfect embodiment of one section of Scripture, Matthew 23:27 to be precise: “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean.”

Which brings us, inappropriately enough, to The Lighter Side:

Finally, we’ll call it a week with these memes from Balls Cotton…

…our sister-in-law Amy…

… and last, but certainly not least, Ed Hickey:

And THEN…

Magoo