This is the era in which we are living.

The current GOP front runner is a serial adulterer who not only persecuted a sitting president for his extramarital acts, but now has the nerve to talk about “sanctity of marriage,” i.e. he gets as many as he wants, queers get none. This man was run out of Congress on a wave of ethics violations. This is a man getting notice now for suggesting that kids be the janitors in their schools. Some of us recall that in 1994, another of his “solutions” to poverty was to re-open orphanages and put the children of families needing federal aid in them. Compassionate conservative solution-finding at its best.

He’s joined in GOP leadership status with a man with no political experience except lobbying — he ran an organization of restaurant owners & lobbied with the tobacco industry against public smoking bans — who also appears to be an adulterer and serial harasser and potentially assaulter of women. His “unique” and innovative tax plan seems, quite seriously, to be substantially built on something from the game The Sims. He doesn’t know some fairly basic facts, mocks the names of other nations and like Sarah Palin has issues with the idea of reading as something a president should maybe do a bit of, from time to time.

The third place slot goes to the person who, by any reasonable measure would be first place, but he’s a Mormon, and that’s apparently a Problem. He’s also so skilled in flip flopping that he should be working morning rush on the pancake griddle at the IHOP. Though largely responsible for creating the (highly successful) model program upon which the Affordable Care Act was designed, he now calls the ACA “Obamacare” and derides it as terribly dangerous and unworkable. This is a man who once tried to physically blockade and religiously intimidate a woman on her way into a hospital for a medically necessary abortion and once tied his family dog, in a small crate, to the roof of the family car for a long trip on interstate highways.

And now Donald Trump is going to moderate a debate where these leading lights of the GOP will share more of their ideas about how Barack Obama isn’t qualified to continue to lead.

There’s got to be something better than this.