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Sens. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz went hard as hell against Donald Trump last night, calling him out for everything from hiring illegal immigrants to being sued over his “Trump University” real estate training programs. Rubio kept at it this morning, mocking Trump by reading his misspelled, mangled tweets out loud at a rally in Texas.

But never let it be said that Trump isn’t a quick thinker. He came out with a press conference in Texas joined by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, whose own attempt to run for president ended in New Hampshire after he failed to catch fire with the electorate. He was there to endorse Trump for president:

“He’s been my friend for many years, he’s been a spectacular governor,” said Mr. Trump, standing with Mr. Christie at a press conference in Fort Worth, Texas, for the announcement.

“I am proud to be here to endorse Donald Trump,” said Mr. Christie, noting they have been friends for a decade.

Mr. Trump “will do exactly what needs to be done to make America a leader around the world again,” said Mr. Christie.

Via The New York Times.

It probably shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise, given that both men are bombastic authoritarians who think their charisma can paper over shortcomings of their policies (Christie was wrong, but we can’t yet say the same for Trump). Christie’s debate shtick was to look directly into the camera to seem more personable and to interrupt any actual discussion of policy by the candidates who were also senators to complain about them just “talking” about issues and not actually doing anything. The last thing he did of note in the race was to get Rubio some negative attention by pointing out Rubio’s tendency to keep repeating talking points (which Rubio has clearly learned from and used it against Trump just last night).

For libertarian conservatives Christie has been a non-starter with terrible positions on surveillance, military intervention, and medical marijuana. He and Sen. Rand Paul attacked each other when the two men were on stage together.  

While campaigning endlessly (and successfully!) in New Hampshire, Ohio Gov. John Kasich, the media-christened “moderate” with the spectacularly interventionist foreign policy agenda, began floating the idea of “regime change” in Stalinist North Korea. “What do we do to try to foster that?” he mused on at least one occasion. This on top of Kasich’s plans to go “massively” with a land war against ISIS, removing Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, and enforcing a no-fly zone over Syria against Russia, for starters.

At last night’s GOP presidential debate, CNN moderator Wolf Blitzer asked Kasich a sensible follow-up question: “[T]he commander of American forces in South Korea said that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un would use a weapon of mass destruction if he thought his regime was being threatened. You have said the United States should start examining a strategy of regime change in North Korea. Let’s be clear. Are you talking about getting rid of Kim Jong Un?”

Note that Blitzer was calling both for clarity of position, and engagement with the concern that trying to topple the murderous millennial would provoke a nuclear war. Kasich’s initial answer was a tautological beaut: “When you talk about regime change, Wolf, it means regime change. That’s what it means.” Thanks for clearing that up.

Ol’ Hand-Paddles then quickly detoured into intercepting ships and aircraft, tightening sanctions, arming NoKo’s neighbors, pressuring the Chinese and so forth, before cycling back and insisting now that “regime change” maybe doesn’t have a plain English meaning after all:

[W]hen I say regime change, I don’t have to talk exactly what that means. Look, I’ve been involved in national security for a long time; you don’t have to spell everything out. But what I’m telling you is you look for any means you can to be able to solve that problem in North Korea, and in the meantime put the pressure on the Chinese….They are the key to being able to settle this situation.

Blitzer pressed on: “Would you risk war for a regime change?”

Kasich responded with perhaps the craziest line in a debate full of ’em:

Wolf, again, it would depend exactly what, you know, what was happening; what the situation was. But if there was an opportunity to remove the leader of North Korea and create stability? Because, I’ll tell you, you keep kicking the can down the road we’re going to face this sooner or later.

But in the meantime, I’m also aware of the fact that there’s 10 million people living in Seoul, so you don’t just run around making charges. I have put it on the table that I would love to see regime change in North Korea.

Now, perhaps the Chinese can actually accomplish that with this man who is now currently the leader, but the fact is we have to bring everything to bear. We have to be firm, and we’ve got to unite those people in that part of the world to stand firmly against North Korea, and make sure we have the ballistic missile technology to defend ourselves.

Set aside all the incoherence and self-contradiction here—the Chinese can maybe accomplish regime change in conjunction with North Korea’s current leader?—and instead focus on that one bolded line. John Kasich is suggesting, after 15 years of chaos in the wake of U.S.-led regime changes around the globe, that this time when we decapitate the dictatorial government of a lousy country it will finally produce that long-lost unicorn of stability. Sorry, Lindsey Graham, there’s your “batshit crazy.”

Last night, as in most every GOP debate (except that Chris Christie one), the media declared Marco Rubio the winner. This time it was even true! But an underacknowledged reason why political journalists feel more comfortable with the guy is that he speaks their language: policy fluency, grown-up concerns about long-term fiscal choices, a convincing-for-the-genre rap about the American Dream, and an alleged Seriousness about foreign policy. And make no mistake—what comprises that seriousness is equal parts surfacely impressive knowledge about a variety of global hotspots, and just straight-up, unrestrained hawkishness. It’s true of Rubio, it’s true of Lindsey Graham, it’s true of everyone else who has run for president in the establishment lane. Including the last Rubio-competitor standing there, John Kasich.

Wanna impress your journalist friends? Learn how to pronounce the various exotic factions you intend to either arm or bomb. Exaggerate threats constantly, re-write your own disastrous foreign policy preferences as need be. It’s not like they’re gonna check! Not as long as you remember to keep reminding them that you’re not one of those crazy people, from or popular among the conservative grassroots, who are fed up in a less-than-perfectly-fluent way with America’s never-resolving wars.

The State newspaper in Columbia, South Carolina, when endorsing Kasich ahead of his thrilling fourth-place, 7.6 percent finish in the Palmetto State, fell for the he’s-not-crazy act hook, line and sinker:

He refuses to pander to those upset about our nation’s leadership. Rather than turning Americans’ concerns into anger, he prefers to be positive. The United States fundamentally is in great shape, he says, although the country has problems. He believes those can be solved with proper leadership that includes listening, educating, and working with both Democrats and Republicans.

He’s not angry, he just wants to carry out regime change all over the globe in the name of “stability,” silly! This, at long last, is what America’s political class considers “moderate.”

In a way, the mainstream debate over Libya is sort of like an exercise in avoiding the passive voice. The Libyan government collapsed. Weapons spread from Nigeria to Syria. People died. You’ve got your subject and verb, and little about actual responsibility.

“We didn’t topple Qaddafi,” Marco Rubio said at last night’s CNN Republican debate, referring to the ruler of Libya until a U.S.-backed intervention in the Libyan civil war. “The Libyan people toppled Qaddafi.”

The only choice for President Obama, according to Rubio, was whether it was going to “happen quickly” or “take a long time.” Qaddafi was caught by Libyan rebels, with U.S. air support, sodomized and killed five months after the NATO intervention started. That delay (in getting the people of Libya to topple Qaddafi) Rubio said was where “‘leading from behind’ came from”.

Of course, the Arab spring-turned-civil war in Libya started around the same time as the one in Syria, where the dictator Bashar Assad is still clinging to power. The U.S., and U.S.-backed rebels on multiple sides of the conflict, insist he must go.

Libya came up last night, actually, in an answer from Ted Cruz about the ceasefire arranged for Syria by the U.S. and Russia, to go in effect at midnight (5pm ET) tonight in Damascus. The ceasefire is an opt-in for the warring parties on the ground.

Cruz said there was “reason to be skeptical” about the ceasefire because of Russia’s strengthened position due to “Obama’s weakness in the Middle East.”

Cruz argued only he could “lay out a clear difference” between himself and Hillary Clinton. “So for example, in Libya, both of them agreed with the Obama/Clinton policy of toppling the government in Libya,” Cruz said. “That was a disaster. It gave the country over to radical Islamic terrorism and it endangered America.”

But he didn’t explain how his approach to Libya (making sand glow?) would be different or yield different results. Instead, he moved on to calling John Kerry “the most anti-Israel secretary of state this country has ever seen.”

Donald Trump denied he supported toppling the Qaddafi government. Cruz said he would post evidence later, but didn’t offer it at the debate.

Trump supported U.S. intervention to remove Qaddafi in a 2011 video blog, saying it would be “very easy and very quick.”

We could do it surgically, stop him from doing it, and save these lives,” Trump said in 2011. “This is absolutely nuts. We don’t want to get involved and you’re gonna end up with something like you’ve never seen before.”

Arguably, Syria fits that description, but I wouldn’t expect Trump to pick up on that “told you so” moment. Would he take Rubio’s route, and say it should have been done even faster and more surgically?

John Kasich, another Republican candidate for president, did bring up Syria in his answer.

“Libya didn’t go down because there was some people revolution,” Kasich said. “Hillary Clinton, Samantha Power and all these other people convinced the president to undermine Gadhafi. They undermined him, and now they have created a cesspool in Libya.”

Now, Kasich argued, the U.S. was “gonna have to deal with” it, referring to the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS) in Libya. “Then we have ISIS in Syria, and we have ISIS in Iraq,” he continued. “Because this administration has not had a strong and firm foreign policy, we are going to inherit, one of us here is going to inherit a total mess.”

There was, of course, some kind of revolution in Libya, but Clinton and other liberal interventionists, like Samantha Power, did convince Obama to go along with calls from the United Nations, the European Union, and the Arab League to act in Libya. Members of Congress, including Rubio and Cruz, didn’t do anything to asset their authority in the war decision-making process.

And how would a “strong and firm foreign policy” in Syria look different than Western action in Libya 2011? Topple Assad even faster? Kasich brought up Iraq too: the remaining Republicans candidates (who have something resembling policy ideas) argue that the U.S. should have remained in Iraq, which would have prevented the rise of ISIS, their way of shifting the blame from the U.S. intervention in Iraq in the first place.

Yet they also argue, as in last night’s debate, that a (2011) intervention in Syria could’ve thwarted the rise of “radical Islamic terrorism” in that country. Yet an intervention in Libya in 2011 only helped ISIS eventually “gain a foothold” in that country. Ah, but Qaddafi was not removed quickly enough. There’s no evidence the political aftermath would look much different with a few extra months of a political vacuum. Would the entire Middle East have to be occupied to prevent the rise of ISIS?

For her part, at this week’s Democratic town hall Clinton touted the intervention in Libya as “the first coalition between NATO and Arab nations” and the kind of experience that qualifies her to be president. She expresses optimism about the political process in Libya, where they “actually held elections” and “elected moderates.”

She mentioned “challenges internally coming from the outside with terrorist groups and other bad actors.” Col. Qaddafi claimed in 2011 that Al-Qaeda would overrun Libya, saying the radical Islamists were backing many of the emerging rebels.

Clinton also blamed “internal disputes” on the continuing conflict in Libya (there are two rival governments vying for power), and said she supported current U.S. actions against ISIS in Libya. She said Libya had a “good election” and pivoted to pointing out the U.S. still had troops in places like South Korea and Germany—a similar argument to the one John McCain used in 2008 to defend keeping U.S. troops in Iraq.

Meanwhile, President Obama this week informed Congress the declaration of a “national emergency with respect to Libya” first issued five years ago would continue.

The notice repeated that the “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States constituted by the actions of Colonel Muammar Qadhafi, his government, and close associates” against the people of Libya as well as the risk that he and his associates would “misappropriate” Libyan state assets necessitated the “national emergency.”

“The situation in Libya continues to pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States,” the president’s notice read, “and we need to protect against the diversion of assets or other abuse by certain members of Qadhafi’s family and other former regime officials.”

Aficionados of anti-drug songs should appreciate this anti-pot number from 1951. Recorded by a forgotten country act called Mr. Sunshine & his Guitar Pickers, its charms include the use of the phrase “just say no” way back when Nancy Reagan was still Nancy Davis:

Here’s how Billboard covered the single when it was released:

I’m not certain what “recent headlines” the Billboard writer had in mind. But one big marijuana story that summer was a major crackdown on the pot growing wild (and sometimes growing with human help) around New York. Ben Gocker of the Brooklyn Public Library explains:

In the summer of 1951 New York City was a marijuana jungle. From underpasses in the Bronx to empty lots on Avenue X, the razor-toothed fronds of 10 foot tall Cannabis sativa plants could be seen all around the city happily waving in the wind like any other innocuous and legal weed. But for all their persistence in invading the city’s forgotten horticultural corners, these plants were likely waving farewell: New York was no friend to pot.

Over the course of the summer about 41,000 pounds of marijuana were uprooted and destroyed during a campaign to eradicate the psychotropic stuff from vacant lots in the city….Responsible for all this destruction was General Inspector of the city’s Sanitation Department, John E. Gleason, who headed up a special “White Wing Squad” charged with harvesting and incinerating the dubious crop….

In this photo, captioned Plenty of Dream Stuff, we see Inspector Gleason and Denis Healy, Sanitation District Superintendent for Greenpoint and Williamsburg, taking the measurements of one especially lofty specimen. At this point in the summer—August 2nd—the Sanitation Department had already dug up “millions of dollars” worth of plants from the “marijuana plantations” of Brooklyn.

Two years later, Gocker adds, Gleason convicted two years later of lying to a grand jury. The general inspector was sentenced to three and a half years behind bars.

(For past editions of the Friday A/V Club, go here.)

Welcome back to the Weekly Reason Contest! This week’s question is:

Apple refuses to hand over an encryption key to the Feds. The Feds are fed up. Come up with the name of the next Apple device to foil the government.

How to enter: Submissions should be e-mailed to contest@reason.com. Please include your name, city and state. This week, kindly type “APPLE” in the subject line. Entries are due by 11 p.m. Eastern Time, Monday, Feb. 29. Winners will appear on March 4. In the case of identical or similar entries, the first one received gets credit. First prize is a one-year digital subscription to Reason magazine, plus bragging rights. While we appreciate kibbitzing in the comments below, you must email your answer to enter the contest. Feel free to enter more than once, and good luck!

And now for the results of last week’s contest: We asked you to predict the name of the next app company to enter the, uh, growing app-connected sex toy market.  You banged out:

THE WINNER

Screwber — Robert Ryan, Dallas City, IL

SECOND PLACE:

Rüber:  The safe sex app for handheld devices — Tim Whalen, Manassas, VA

THIRD PLACE:

Backdoor, by Apple — Drew Beardslee, Grand Rapids, MI

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

The Bedroomba – Let’s keep it clean

eGovernment – Now it screws you over the Internet — Tim Whalen, Manassas, VA

Plug and Play Toy Company  — S.R.

Jingles to Tingles  — David Pinto, Longmeadow, MA

iTapMyself – Brian Too Embarrassed , Alamosa, CO

Firm Consent: An app-controlled sex toy that stops every ten seconds to ask, “Is this okay?” Requires the user to scribe their initials and enter the date and time to resume function. — Dan Mahoney, Baja, MX

Clitbit — Robert Ryan, Dallas City, IL

Sit On My Facebook — Robert Ryan. Dallas City, IL

iTouch Myself

I’d App That

Menage a Tron — C.M.

Mistress Siri asks you the questions, worm. — Colin Blake, Boston, MA

AND FROM THE COMMENTS:

Atlas Plugged

The Mountin’ Head

Von Pleezes

Horny Birds