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Washington: It was an ugly and dispiriting public spectacle, drawn out over the grim days after the Paris attacks.
All week prominent members of one of America's two major parties indulged in a carnival of fear and hate that by Thursday night some observers were beginning to see as dangerous.
Republican presidential candidates and state governors, cheered on by Fox News commentators, competed with one-another to take ever more inhumane stances the 10,000 Syrian refugees that President Barack Obama has proposed admitting to the US.
Donald Trump, the real estate mogul who shot to the front of Republican polls after calling Mexicans rapists in his campaign launch, set the terms of this debate as early as September
"I'm putting the people on notice that are coming here from Syria as part of this mass migration," he told an audience in New Hampshire. "If I win, they're going back. They're going back. I'm telling you. They're going back."
He has stuck to that stance ever since and after the attacks on Paris, the flagging establishment candidate Jeb Bush clearly felt the need to toughen up by comparison.
In breezy defiance of America's sacred first amendment Bush announced he would only accept Christian refugees. "You can't prove it, then, you know, you err on the side of caution," he said on Tuesday.
The hardline Catholic Rick Santorum pirouetted triumphantly over Bush, saying later that day, "We should not be admitting either Muslims or Christians, and you'll say, 'Whoa why won't you want to admit Christians?' because in so doing we would be accomplishing exactly what ISIS wants to accomplish, which is to rid the area of Christians, which is to rid the area of moderate Muslims."
Tough-guy New Jersey governor confirmed in a radio interview that the threat to national security was so great he would not even make an exception for a three-year-old orphan.
Now most of the Republican presidential class of 2016 is in line, though the more nimble of them keep darting further into the darkness whenever they spy a chink of light not yet blocked.
Three bills seeking to block refugees have found their way into the Republican-dominated Congress, one of which passed and is destined vetoed by President Barack Obama, despite the fact that 47 Democrats had sided with Republicans and backed the vote.
And 29 state governors – one of them a Democrat – jumped on board too throughout the week too, vowing to block federal spending in their states on services for refugees.
Trump, perhaps fearing he was losing his lead in the race to the bottom, fought back in an interview with Yahoo News.
Asked how he would might increase surveillance on American Muslims – as he had earlier proposed – he replied he would take measures considered "unthinkable" a year ago.
"We are going to have to do things that we have never done before and some people are going to be upset about it, but I think that now everybody is feeling that security is going to rule."
Asked by another reporter on Thursday if this included creating a database of Muslims, Trump leapt at the notion.
"I would certainly implement that, absolutely," he told NBC News during a campaign stop in Iowa.
"There should be a lot of systems, beyond databases. We should have a lot of systems."
And to reinforce his qualifications for the task he reminded the reporter more than once that it was all about "good management."
He fleshed out the idea in later exchange when asked whether Muslims would be legally obligated to sign into the database, he responded, "They have to be – they have to be."
And later again asked how this would differ from the policies of Nazi Germany he responded enigmatically, "You tell me, you tell me".
Ben Carson, the former neurosurgeon who is coming second to Trump in national polls joined in on Thursday. As is so often the case, he chose a simple course into the discussion, likening Syrian refugees to dogs.
"If there's a rabid dog running around your neighbourhood you're probably not gonna assume something good about that dog," he said.
Throughout the week the president condemned the Republican rhetoric, mocking it as fearful and deriding it as un-American.
In a statement the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum made the obvious point in a rare public statement.
"Acutely aware of the consequences to Jews who were unable to flee Nazism, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum looks with concern upon the current refugee crisis. "While recognising that security concerns must be fully addressed, we should not turn our backs on the thousands of legitimate refugees.
"The Museum calls on public figures and citizens to avoid condemning today's refugees as a group. It is important to remember that many are fleeing because they have been targeted by the Assad regime and ISIS for persecution and in some cases elimination on the basis of their identity."
The Museum's concerns were echoed by the nation's largest Orthodox Jewish lobbying group, the Orthodox Union Advocacy Center, which said in a statement, "The Jewish community has an important perspective on this debate. Just a few decades ago, refugees from the terror and violence in Hitler's Europe sought refuge in the United States and were turned away due to suspicions about their nationality."
Carson and Trump have more in common than polling dominance and ugly rhetoric.
Neither man has made any valuable contribution to the debate on what will likely be the most pressing foreign policy concerns for the next administration – how to end the war in Syria and how to combat IS.
Trump said in a speech last weekend his plan was to, "Bomb the shit out of them." Carson said in an interview he would forge a coalition of American allies in the region, but given three opportunities he could not name a single one.
The wiser older voices that might call the party to order are either being ignored or have been silenced. So dire is the situation that the political editor of Slate called on George W Bush – the man responsible for so much of the chaos in the Middle East – to intervene.
He reminded readers that less than a week after the September 11 attacks the Bush addressed the nation from the Islamic Center of Washington, saying, "America counts millions of Muslims amongst our citizens, and Muslims make an incredibly valuable contribution to our country," he told his mourning nation.
"Muslims are doctors, lawyers, law professors, members of the military, entrepreneurs, shopkeepers, moms and dads. And they need to be treated with respect. In our anger and emotion, our fellow Americans must treat each other with respect."
The Republican Party could do with a voice like his today.
