WINNERS:

Ted Cruz: I found myself rooting for him! That’s right—when the collective American political consciousness is visibly and rapidly decomposing into a gray, furiously racist sentient sludge, up becomes down, ignorance becomes strength, and the impossible becomes the commonplace

Donald Trump: “How can we defeat him?” cries the entire opinion section of the Washington Post for the third day in a row. “How does he keep doing this?” laments FOX News and CNN, as their correspondents rush to give him the first interview after the conclusion of every debate. “How is he so awful?” gnash the collective teeth at Gawker, Buzzfeed, and the Huffington Post, as yet another article about his “having the best words” rockets to the top of their most-viewed list

Political and corporate suicide: By endorsing Donald Trump, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and NASCAR CEO Brian France have brought much-needed awareness to these terrible twin scourges

Talk: For as much as everyone likes to denounce this old stalwart, it is all we have seen in this election cycle

LOSERS:

Action: Despite everyone on the debate stage publicly aligning themselves with it last night, they all have yet to perform, or even demonstrate a record of, this popular aspect of human existence

John Kasich: [requisite joke about how he’s still hampered by the fact that he is John Kasich, since I desperately want to turn his name into a self-explanatory term for political mediocrity]

Years of dedicated and increasingly fruitful attempts to attract a more diverse audience to a sport with a deserved reputation as a bastion for conservative Southern white people: Did Brian France seriously think that he could endorse Donald Trump in front of thousands at a rally in Georgia, alongside four NASCAR drivers, one of whom is a sixteen-time winner of the Most Popular Driver award, and not have it be instantly associated with the sport he is quite literally charged with running?

Donald Trump’s genitalia: Try as he might, he’s not fooling anybody here

Brazil: You think THIS is bad? Lula, who was president of Brazil as recently as 2011, was just detained by police for questioning on suspicion that he profited from the ongoing, multibillion-dollar Petrobras corruption scandal; impeachment proceedings against his successor Dilma are being put into motion; and meanwhile in the Senate, Romário, who in addition to being a prominent anti-corruption Senator is widely regarded as one of the greatest soccer players of all time, spent yesterday afternoon flirting publicly on Facebook with an actress who had revealed in an interview that she fantasizes about him while masturbating

Marco Rubio: The Republican Party must be wishing they’d backed Marco Sapphiro instead *ba dum tss*

Woodchuck Granny Smith Hard Green Apple Hard Cider: Vile stuff. 3/10 would not recommend as mechanism to drink away pain of watching the country’s swift and devastating collapse play out on national television