FULL VIDEO: First Presidential Debate 2012

Oh boy, was this one for the history books.

There's going to be a bunch of fact-checking and spin all through the week and into the Sunday news shows, but the unshakable fact is that Mitt Romney destroyed Obama on Wednesday night. It was a crushing performance and the left is completely demoralized. Jonah Goldberg captures things well at National Review, "There Went the Boom" (via Memeorandum):

I’ve been getting more and more cautiously optimistic about Romney in the last few days and, going in, I had a pretty good feeling about tonight’s debate. But I had no expectation that Romney would simply control the night the way he did. I don’t think Obama did terribly on the merits, even though he clearly lost by a wide margin on points. But you don’t really score a debate like this on points. Romney simply dominated and deflated Obama. This was the first time millions of people ever heard Mitt Romney make a case for himself at any length. Most Americans didn’t watch the GOP debates. The ratings for Romney’s convention speech were sub-par and he never really talked about policy anyway at the convention. But tonight Romney brilliantly dismantled the straw man Obama has been running against for months. I think it was David Freddoso who said on Twitter that if all you knew about Romney was what you saw in Obama’s TV ads, you’d get the sense that Obama’s been lying to you all this time. Romney helped himself tonight — possibly a lot.

Actually, more than a lot. Romney helped himself enormously. More at the link.