Fidel Castro in hell, Americans on Mars, “self-deportation” of illegal aliens and an unwarranted U.S. attacks on Iran?

Those are just a few of the various topics discussed at the first of two Republican debates in Florida before the state’s Jan. 31 primary. The NBC News debate, moderated by NBC’s Brian Williams, had been hyped as a dramatic showdown between the top two Republican candidates in the race – Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich – in the midst of ongoing sparring over release of Romney’s tax returns and Gingrich’s Freddie Mac “consulting” record.

Mitt, Newt wrangle over records

Romney began by firing at Gingrich: “We just learned today that his contract with Freddie Mac was provided by the lobbyists at Freddie Mac. I don’t think we can possibly retake the White House if the person who is leading our party is the person who was working for the head chief lobbyist of Freddie Mac. Freddie Mac was paying Speaker Gingrich $1,600,000 at the same time that Freddie Mac was costing the people of Florida millions upon millions of dollars.”

Gingrich flatly denied peddling influence, saying, “I was supposed to do consulting work. … There’s no place in the contract that provides for lobbying. I’ve never done any lobbying. There’s a point in this process where it gets unnecessarily personal and nasty, and that’s sad.”

Romney argued that the contract Gingrich recently released doesn’t say he provided “historical experience.”

“It says that you were hired as a consultant, and you were hired by the chief lobbyist of Freddie Mac – not the CEO, not the head of public affairs – by the chief lobbyist at Freddie Mac,” he barked at Gingrich. “You also spoke publicly in favor of these GSEs, these government-sponsored entities, at the very time that Freddie Mac was getting America in a position where we we’d have a massive housing collapse. You could have spoken out aggressively.”

Likewise, Gingrich has been hammering Romney on his reluctance to release his tax records. The former Massachusetts governor released more than 500 pages of tax documents records today, indicating that he will pay $6.2 million in taxes on $45.2 million in income for 2010 and 2011.

At the debate, Romney promised “no surprises” in his financial disclosures.

“Oh, I’m sure people will talk about it,” he said. “I mean, you’ll see my income, how much taxes I’ve paid, how much I paid to charity. You’ll see how complicated taxes can be. But I pay all the taxes that are legally required and not a dollar more. I don’t think you want someone as the candidate for president who pays more taxes than he owes. … Is it entirely legal and fair? Absolutely.”

Gingrich said Romney’s decision to release tax documents is “the right thing to do.”

Paul as 3rd party candidate?

Later, the debate turned to Ron Paul as NBC’s Brian Williams asked the Texas representative, “If Newt Gingrich emerges from the GOP primary process as the nominee of the party, do you go your own way?”

“Well, I’ve done a lot of that in my lifetime,” Paul replied, to the audible amusement of the crowd.

Williams clarified: “I should be more specific. Will you run as a third-party candidate?”

“I have no plans to do that, no intention,” Paul said. “When I’ve been pressed on it, they asked me why, and I said I don’t want to. But I haven’t been an absolutist. When I left Congress, I didn’t have any plans on going back, but I did after 12 years. I went back to medicine. So, no, I don’t have any plans to do that, no.”

The Williams asked Paul if he would support Gingrich as the Republican nominee if he wins.

“He keeps hinting about attacking the Fed, and he talks about gold,” Paul replied. “You know, if I could just change him on foreign policy, we might be able to talk business.”

Fidel Castro in hell?

Williams posed the following question to the candidates: “Let’s say President Romney gets a phone call, and it is to say that Fidel Castro has died and there are credible people in the Pentagon who predict upward of a half a million Cubans may take that as a cue to come to the United States. What do you do?”

Romney chimed in with a response that drew laughs and applause: “Well, first of all, you thank heavens that Fidel Castro has returned to his maker and will be sent to another land.”

The he added, “No. 2, you work very aggressively with the new leadership in Cuba to try and move them toward a more open degree than they’ve had in the past. … This president has taken a very dangerous course with regard to Cuba, saying we’re going to relax relations, we’re going to open up travel to Cuba. This is the wrong time for that.”

Williams turned to Gingrich and asked, “What do you do if folks start arriving in the United States?”

“I don’t think that Fidel is going to meet his maker,” he said, suggesting Castro might be bound for hell. “I think he’s going to go to another place.”

Then Gingrich continued, “I would suggest the policy of the United States to be to aggressively overthrow the regime and to do everything we can to support those Cubans who want freedom. … I would try to put in place a very aggressive policy of reaching out to every single Cuban who would like to be free … reaching out to the younger generation inside the dictatorship and indicating they don’t have a future as a dictatorship because the Gingrich presidency will not tolerate four more years of this dictatorship.”

“Are you talking about engaging the U.S. military?” Williams asked.

Gingrich replied, “I’m talking about using every asset available to the United States including appropriate covert operations.”

In contrast to the other candidates’ plans, Paul noted that he would do “pretty much the opposite.”

“I don’t like the isolationism of not talking to people. … The Cold War is over,” he said. “I don’t know why the Cuban people should be so intimidating. Man, I don’t know where you get this assumption that all of the sudden all the Cubans are coming here. … I think we’re living in the Dark Ages if we can’t even talk to the Cuban people. I think it’s not 1962 anymore, and we don’t have to use force, intimidation and overthrow of a government. I just don’t think that’s going to work.”

Iran and ‘acts of war’

When the subject turned to Iran, Romney said he would consider it an “act of war” if the Islamic republic were to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, a key transit route for global oil.

“Of course it’s an act of war,” he said. “It is appropriate and essential for our military, for our Navy to maintain open seas. … We want to show Iran any action of that nature will be considered an act of war, an act of terror, and America is going to keep those sea lanes open.”

Gingrich added, “The Iranians are practicing closing the Strait of Hormuz, actively taunting us, so [Obama] cancels a military exercise with the Israelis so as not to be provocative? Dictatorships respond to strength. They don’t respond to weakness. I think there’s a very grave danger that the Iranians think that, in fact, this president is so weak that they could close the Strait of Hormuz and not suffer substantial consequences.”

Paul suggested Iran’s military and political leaders would be responding to Western sanctions that would halt Iranian oil exports.

“You have to think about the preliminary act that might cause them to want to close the Strait of Hormuz,” Paul said. “That’s a blockade. We’re blockading them. Can you imagine what we would do if somebody blockaded the Gulf of Mexico? That would be an act of war. So the act of war has already been committed. This is a retaliation.”

At that point in the debate, Santorum stepped up to offer his thoughts on the impact of a nuclear Iran:

“What happens if Iran gets a nuclear weapon? The entire world changes. …

“The bottom line is: The theocracy that runs Iran is the equivalent of having al-Qaida in charge of a country with huge oil reserves, gas reserves and a nuclear weapon. That is something that no president could possibly allow to have happen under any circumstances. …

“Let’s look at the acts of war of Iran. They are holding hostages. They are attacking our troops. There are IEDs, improvised explosive devices, that are killing our troops in Afghanistan and killed them in Iraq and maimed so many. They were produced and people were trained and funded in Iran, specifically to kill American troops. You look at the ships that have been attacked by Iran. Embassies were attacked by Iran. Iran has plotted to kill the Saudi ambassador here in this country. There is a long list of attacks, of war-like behavior on the part of this regime.

“To believe that if they have a nuclear weapon, they somehow can come into the community of nations is a reckless act on the part of a president. It would be reckless not to do something to stop them from getting this nuclear weapon.”

The candidates also debated other topics, such as the burst of the housing bubble, repeal of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, Gingrich and Romney’s support for a military component of the DREAM Act, the U.S. space program putting Americans on Mars and Romney’s plan for “self-deportation” of illegal aliens.

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