Before I drifted off out of boredom, I caught the first part of Democratic debate seven, on foreign policy, health care, identity politics, and other topics, and oh, what a revelation about these last six characters from the clown car still standing.  These are the people who would occupy the White House, and you wouldn't want to be there if it happened. 

Five things stick out as doozies of contradictions, hypocrisy, and full-blown whoppers:

5. The Warren-Sanders "woman as president" wrangle.  Before the debate, Elizabeth Warren made waves by claiming that Bernie Sanders told her a woman couldn't win the presidency.  On the surface, it's hard to believe, given that Bernie has been around the block and remembers Margaret Thatcher only too well.  But more to the point, Warren is fond of bringing up 1970s-style feminist tropes from the Gloria Steinem era — female teachers being fired for being pregnant, for example — that are out of date.  Warren is famous for her lies — which include that of her being a Native American to claim victim status; her claim her dad was a "janitor" to claim down-and-out status; her claim that her kids went to public schools when they also went to private, to claim working-class status again and union hearts; her claim she was too poor to afford college application fees to sound down and out yet again, when she would have had cough one up for the scholarship she won.  It's all fake.  The feminist lies are especially vivid.  So now we had the showdown with Warren and Sanders in the same room, and reporters attempting to sort out who was telling the truth, and the one who asked Warren completely accepting her claim as fact.  Both were ready — Sanders made several fierce denials and wouldn't let them try to change the topic; Warren made an icky speech about the importance of female presidents. 

PHILLIP: Sen. Warren, what did you think when Sen. Sanders told you a woman could not win the election?

(LAUGHTER)

WARREN: I disagreed. Bernie is my friend, and I am not here to try to fight with Bernie. But, look, this question about whether or not a woman can be president has been raised, and it's time for us to attack it head-on.

And I think the best way to talk about who can win is by looking at people's winning record. So, can a woman beat Donald Trump?

Look at the men on this stage. Collectively, they have lost 10 elections.

(LAUGHTER)

The only people on this stage who have won every single election that they've been in are the women...

(APPLAUSE)

... Amy and me.

(This, by the way, wasn't true, as Bernie pointed out, citing an election he won 30 years ago.)

Do you notice something? Warren didn't stand by her story; she just tried to shift the topic.  She should have stood up and told Sanders she knew very well what he said, and she didn't.  She didn't defend her claim at all.  Sounds like another whopper.

4. Klobuchar on Iran negotiations.  Amy Klobuchar pretty well came off as a boob by saying she was all in for Iran negotiations because Iran wasn't following its agreements made in...negotiations:

Sen. Klobuchar, if you become president, it's very possible there won't be an Iran nuclear deal for the United States to rejoin. Given that, how would you prevent Iran from gaining a nuclear weapon?

KLOBUCHAR: I would start negotiations again. And I won't take that as a given, given that our European partners are still trying to hold the agreement together. My issue is that, because of the actions of Donald Trump, we are in a situation where they are now starting — Iran is starting to enrich uranium again in violation of the original agreement.

So what I would do is negotiate. I would bring people together, just as President Obama did years ago, and I think that we can get this done. But you have to have a president that sees this as a number-one goal.

And in answer to the original question you asked the mayor, I would not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon. And then you have to get an agreement in place. I think there are changes you can make to the agreement that are sunset, some changes to the inspections, but overall, that is what we should do. 

And I am the one person on this debate stage, on the first night of the very first debate, when we were asked what we saw as the biggest threat to our world, I said China on the economy, but I said Iran, because of Donald Trump. Because I feared that exactly what happened would happen: enrichment of uranium, escalation of tensions, leaving frayed relations with our allies. We can bring them back, understanding this is a terrorist regime that we cannot allow to have a nuclear weapon.

OK, so let's get this straight.  Iran was violating its treaty it negotiated, so the solution is more negotiations?  The mullahs would roll this stupid woman like a Persian carpet if she ever made it into the White House.  If Iran's ignoring the agreements made in past negotiations and getting itself a nuclear weapon instead, why would "bringing people together" make them act any different? They'd negotiate with her, snicker up their sleeves, and go make a bomb. File under woman who has no idea what she's talking about.

3. Joe Biden's Mess of Answers on Foreign Policy: Joe's the man for the status quo ante, the Obama era that somehow brought us Donald Trump, yet somehow was a paradise of sorts. Now it's Paradise Lost. Three idiocies from this supposed foreign policy man stood out, starting with this North Korea exchange, reminding us all why we voted for Trump:

PHILLIP: Vice President Biden, I want to ask you about North Korea. President Trump has met with Kim Jong-un three times. President Obama once said he would meet with North Korea without any preconditions. Would you meet with North Korea without any preconditions?

BIDEN: No, not now. I wouldn't meet with them without any preconditions. Look, what — we gave him everything he's looking for, legitimacy. The president showed up, met with him, gave him legitimacy, weakened the sanctions we have against him.

Need to know ahead of the caucuses:

I would be putting what I did as vice president — I met with Xi Jinping more than anyone else. I would be putting pressure on China to put pressure on Korea, to cease and desist from their nuclear power, make — their efforts to deal with nuclear weapons. I would move forward as we did before — and you reported it extensively, Wolf — about moving forward the whole notion of defense against nuclear weapons, that we would — and when China said to me, when Xi Jinping said to me, that's a threat to us, I said, we're going to move and protect our interests unless you get involved and protect it.

[I] would be putting what I did as vice president — I met with Xi Jinping more than anyone else. I would be putting pressure on China to put pressure on Korea, to cease and desist from their nuclear power, make — their efforts to deal with nuclear weapons. I would move forward as we did before — and you reported it extensively, Wolf — about moving forward the whole notion of defense against nuclear weapons, that we would — and when China said to me, when Xi Jinping said to me, that's a threat to us, I said, we're going to move and protect our interests unless you get involved and protect it.

Umm, Joe, you've got the phone line to Kim now. Cat's out of the bag. Joe says pretend that never happened and he'd would rather work through China, trustworthy China, as his trusted intermediary. Talk about throwing away an advantage and outsourcing the matter to China's good offices. Sound like a plan? The clown throws away an advantage in the name of Getting Trump.

Here's another one:

BLITZER: So just to be clear, Vice President Biden, would you leave troops in the Middle East or would you pull them out?

BIDEN: I would leave troops in the Middle East in terms of patrolling the Gulf, where we have — where we are now, small numbers of troops, and I think it's a mistake to pull out the small number of troops that are there now to deal with ISIS.

So they can be target practice, Joe? Same as the good old pre-Trump days? As American Thinker's brilliant contributor, Monty Donohew has noted in a must-read essay - Trump himself doesn't do "small numbers of troops" because they only end up as target practice and tempting hostage prospects. Trump blew that decades-old approach out of the water by pulling out U.S. troops from Syria and since then, extremely bad times have followed for terrorists, not just al-Baghdadi but Iran's notorious Quds Force chieftain, Qassem Soleimani himself, both of whom got blown to hell. Biden would rather they have some convenient targets to work on.

Here's the real whopper:

BLITZER: Vice President Biden, is Sen. Warren right [about withdrawing all U.S. troops from the Middle East]? 

BIDEN: Well, I tell you what, there's a difference between combat troops and leaving special forces in a position. I was part of the coalition to put together 68 countries to deal with stateless terror as well as failed states. Not us alone, 68 other countries.

That's how we were able to defeat and end the caliphate for ISIS. They'll come back if we do not deal with them and we do not have someone who can bring together the rest of the world to go with us, with small numbers of special forces we have, to organize the effort to take them down. 

Seems we're back in Joe's full Walter Mitty world, the world of where he "defeated" ISIS and President Trump's decapitation of the ISIS leadership just this year never happened. Joe's the one who defeated ISIS, see. He's always the hero ... in the cracked recesses of his own mind. He'd like you there, too.

2. Warren's sudden concern for fiscal discipline:

You know, I have three brothers who were in the military, and I know how much our military families sacrifice. But I also know that we have to think about our defense in very different ways. We have to think about cyber. We have to think about climate. We also have to think about how we spend money. 

We have a problem with a revolving door in Washington between the defense industry and the Department of Defense and the Pentagon. That is corruption, pure and simple. We need to block that revolving door, and we need to cut our defense budget. We need to depend on all of our tools — diplomatic, economic, working with our allies — and not let the defense industry call the shots.

This is the same Elizabeth Warren who wants a $3 trillion wealth tax to finance her government programs, which total up to $30 trillion in new government spending? The defense budget she wants to cut is a drop in the bucket compared to all that spending she's planning to throw around on us, a mere $693 billion at last count, not even making the cut to one of her plan of $30 trillion. So that's the one she wants to cut while flinging money around in the biggest drunkfest of spending of all time? Something tells us she doesn't get it about numbers.

1. Bernie Sanders's concern-trolling about all those administrative costs connected to medical care as it is and how he's supposedly against them.

Sen. Sanders, your campaign proposals would double federal spending over the next decade, an unprecedented level of spending not seen since World War II. How would you keep your plans from bankrupting the country?

SANDERS: No, our plan wouldn't bankrupt the country. And, in fact, it would much improve the well-being of working-class families and the middle class.

Let us be clear what Medicare for all does. It ends all premiums. It ends all copayments. It ends the absurdity of deductibles. It ends out-of-pocket expenses. It takes on the pharmaceutical industry, which in some cases charges us 10 times more for the same prescription drugs sold abroad as sold here. 

What we will do through a Medicare for all single-payer program is substantially lower the cost of health care for employers and workers, because we end the $100 billion a year that the health care industry makes and the $500 billion a year we spend in administrative — the administrative nightmare of dealing with thousands of separate insurance plans.

Is this a joke? Since when does a Soviet-style health care plan such as Bernie proposes not include masses and masses of red tape? Soviet dissident writers such as Vladimir Voinovich wrote hilarious books about stupid, obtuse, time-serving "blotting paper bureaucrats" who covered the socialist Soviet system. Socialized medicine, like all huge government programs is going to be the Mother of all Bureaucracy, just to administer the nightmare. Since when do government programs not involve bureaucracy? And considering all the paperwork requirements President Obama saddled health insurance companies with in implementing Obamacare, where does Bernie think all that paperwork insurance companies are supposedly profiting off of, is going? That's right, the government. Moving the bureaucracy to government from the private sector is not going to end any administrative costs. If anything, with nothing to check their costs, it's going to create incentives for even more paperwork. A government takeover of an entire industry is going to solve red tape? Just ask the student loan industry which got federalized and sank deep into the red tape. Call this one the whopper of the evening. 

Image credit: ABC YouTube screen shot.