It will be broadcast again from the Reagan Presidential Library. It starts at 5:30 pm our time, and Eli Sanders and Sean Nelson will liveslog.
It will be broadcast again from the Reagan Presidential Library, minus Scott Walker this time. It starts at 5:30 pm. Eli Sanders and Sean Nelson will be liveslogging it. Joseph Sohm / Shutterstock.com

Once more unto the blech, dear friends. The Republican personalities assemble yet again tonight to say words — so many words! You can watch them, if you want, but tonight's your only chance to see Jackie Beat at Narwhal (the downstairs stage at Unicorn), an event you're far more likely to appreciate. Also, tonight on KOMO they're showing an all-new holiday episode of Wheel of Fortune, which will be relatively painless and boasts a level of discourse that is comparable to the debates.

But hey, who knows, maybe the candidates will do something really good tonight. Trump's getting annoyed that he's not indisputably at the top of the field anymore, so he might bite Wolf Blitzer. Rand Paul might advance to the next stage of his slow transformation into Carrot Top. And Ted Cruz might finally admit what I've suspected all along, that his head is really a wig on top of a flesh-colored breast implant.

Or they might just talk at length about nothing.

I don't know why CNN insists on calling it a "debate," since it's not like anyone's listening/refuting/conceding. If anything, it's just a very lengthy tribal council segment from Survivor, only without the pleasure of seeing one of the participants sent out in the ocean to perish.

They'll likely be asked to talk about national security, given the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, so it should be a good night for racists.

But it should be a bad night for losers like Kasich, Fiorina, Paul, and Bush, all of whom have at one point flirted with optimism but are now just inches away from dropping out of the race. The debates are their only shots at national publicity right now, so if the low-ranking candidates want anyone to remember that they exist, they'll have to do something really memorable. Fiorina came close with her imaginary baby-parts video, but only political types noticed that happened — which is good for her, because it would have been a huge turn-off if normal people were paying attention to politics right now.

So the bottom-of-the-barrel candidates will walk out onto that stage (the Reagan Library again, CNN says) knowing that they need to pull a real crazy stunt. Maybe Paul will have confetti in his sleeves, or Kasich will challenge everyone to an arm-wrestling contest before revealing that he has one super muscular arm.

They might look to Spain for inspiration, where one Presidential candidate just called the other indecent during a debate, and the other responded by calling him contemptible. Fun!

But more likely they'll just bristle and look unhappy, and then we'll never have to think about them again.

If there's any good news to come out of all this, it's that some of the truly vile candidates have been downgraded to the humiliating not-a-chance pre-show (which we will not be liveslogging). College dropout and blustering gravy boat Mike Huckabee will join Rick Santorum on his continuing search for a chin. Next to them will be man's-man Lindsey Graham, and also George Pataki, who still refuses to pull over and ask for directions to whatever political job he actually has a chance of getting.

These candidates might as well be debating the relative merits of their neckties for all the difference it'll make, but it's kind of CNN to arrange this after-school program to keep them off the streets.