Ted Cruz won Thursday's Republican presidential debate in Detroit "hands down," radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh said Friday.
"I don't think it's even close,"
Limbaugh said on his afternoon program. "Ted Cruz was in a different league last night.
"Ted Cruz was in a different debate than what everybody else was doing, including [John] Kasich," he added. "Ted Cruz was running rings around everybody — in terms of awareness of the issues, knowledge of the issues, mastering whatever it was that was discussed."
He noted that the Texas senator took negative questions from Fox News co-moderator Megyn Kelly and "blew it out of the park."
Limbaugh said that Cruz provided, for instance, the best answer regarding the Flint water crisis: "liberalism! Left-wing policies!"
"For 50 years, everything that's going wrong wherever you go in the country, the people who have been running it are the left-wing Democrat Party," he said. "Wherever they've been in charge unchecked, everything's a mess — just like it is in Detroit."
He called the exchanges between rivals Donald Trump and Marco Rubio "most entertaining.
"Trump is entertaining and captivating and dominating wherever he is participating — no matter what he says and no matter how he says it.
"But, really, for the first time — I don't know how else to explain this other than to say in terms of the old way that we used to consider qualifications for the presidency — the old way in which we used to analyze competence, Ted Cruz hit a grand-slam home run last night."
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