Photoshop source: SaveJersey.com

You can peruse my Twitter page for highlights and lowlights of the CNN GOP debate in Florida, but this basically sums it up:

Wolf Blitzer went all Oprah/TMZ with his fishing into the candidates’ wives’ lives.

Newt doubled down on open-borders stupid and gave an indignant defense of illegal alien grandmothers that the SEIU and La Raza would love. To which Romney aptly replied: “The problem isn’t 11 million illegal alien grandmothers.”

Rick Santorum and Ron Paul sparred over Latin American dictators and freedom-fighters. Paul supporters the former. Santorum supports the latter.

Paul shined where he’s strongest — providing a clarion stand against government bailouts. Santorum landed solid blows on health care and the individual mandate supported by both Romney and Gingrich. Romney failed to defend his painfully exposed Achilles’ heel, Romneycare — and bizarrely argued that we needn’t “get angry about it.” Smile while your budgets are hemorrhaging…

Santorum also said encouraging things about the need to get entitlements under control instead of spending on pie-in-the-sky moon missions. Then again, this is a guy who supported the massive prescription drug entitlement under Bush.

Sigh.

Blitzer devoted an embarrassing amount of time to Gingrich’s moon colonization plan, prompting Paul (here I am saying something positive about Paul again!) to jibe that the only people we need to send to the moon are some politicians.

Score.

I was glad to take my nose plugs off for a fleeting moment and appreciate some lively, substantive debate — even if it happened unintentionally between bouts of Wolf Blitzer-led bloviations and special interest-pandering. There was no Macarena, but Wolf and the candidates came pretty close.

Big loser: Gingrich.

Big gainer: Santorum.

Big surprise: Paul’s likeability factor, even if he is completely on the moon when it comes to Israel, jihadists, and national security.

Big, unchanged reality: Big Government Romney, Big Government Gingrich, and Not As Big A Government As He Voted For When He Was in the Senate But Still Too Big Government Santorum.

The journey/march/slog (towards a brokered convention??????) continues…