Republicans, CNN and Growing Irrelevance

The latest Republican "debate" demonstrates either how far CNN has fallen or how utterly irrelevant the Republican Party has become.
In what should've been, by any reasonable standard, a debate about issues was instead a series of increasingly bizarre questions regarding illegal immigration, the bible and the confederate flag. And in responses to immigration, no one addressed why we have such high numbers of immigrants (legal or otherwise)--namely, NAFTA, CAFTA (and three additional, pending agreements with other Latin American nations) and globalization, generally. Apparently, it isn't clear to these candidates that the people from Latin America are, implicitly, criticizing with their feet lop-sided trade agreements, else they would remain at home gainfully employed.
Instead, the candidates argued about whether illegal immigrants were employed at Mitt Romney's or Rudy Giuliani's governors' mansions and who would exhaust themselves the fastest "securing our borders."
But bizarre questions aside, there were some equally bizarre answers. Here's one:
Question: "What would you do as president to repair the image of America in the eyes of the Muslim world?"
Sen. McCain (R-AZ): "Well, I would do a lot of things, but the first and most important and vital element is to continue this surge which is succeeding and we are winning the war in Iraq. That's the first thing I would do. I would make sure that we do what we can to help reconstruct the country, to help the Maliki government move forward as rapidly as possible to train the police."
Even though the surge is drawing down. Even though reconstructing Iraq, training its police and helping the government (presumably to engage Sunnis in order to have a more representative government) was the goal in 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007. It's nearly 2008. And this is McCain's answer.
But even stranger was Duncan Hunter's response: "[W]hen you [Muslim countries] were threatened from outside, the Americans left the safety of their own homes to come and defend you. I will never apologize for the United States of America."
He didn't specify which countries were threatened, by whom, or how the US defended them. As there was no follow-up by CNN, I suppose we'll never know.
It's remarkable to witness how far our political "elite" have fallen. And the media's encouragement of this, this ignominy, is as much a disgrace as anything.