Here’s a nice summary from Fred Kaplan at Slate of the most notable responses from the Republican Presidential candidates to the three transactions the US concluded with Iran this week: the release of the Navy sailors, the nuclear deal and subsequent release of Iranian assets and this morning’s prisoner exchange.

It was pretty evident even to us non-experts that the candidates were idiots when they denounced the temporary detention of United States Navy sailors who’d strayed into Iran’s territorial waters. What do they think the United States Coast Guard does when another nation’s boats stray into ours?

Then some of them screeched that Iran should not be “given” the $150 billion that was part of the nuclear deal signed late last year. It seems obvious these people don’t even know that that money was and always has been Iranian and that it’s been frozen and unavailable to its government as part of the sanctions regime which got them to do the nuclear deal in the end. Nor do the candidates seem to understand that the deal included the unfreezing of those assets upon completion or destruction of certain nuclear facilities in Iran.

Finally the idiocy became completely obvious when they squalled about the prisoner exchange which brought five Americans out of Iranian custody and on their way home today. “My pushing might’ve had something to do with it,” Trump said. Here’s Kaplan:

Even by Trump standards, the egomania embedded in this remark is staggering. But it also reflects something more dangerous about not just Trump but most of the leading GOP candidates: a view that “hitting them hard” is the only way to get people to do things, and that patient diplomacy is for suckers and weaklings.

Exactly. It’s kind of scary when you learn that the leading candidates put forth by one of the two major political parties in the most powerful nation in the world are not only buffoons but dangerously stupid buffoons at that. Kaplan again:

The events of the past week reveal a few things about the Republican critique of Obama’s foreign policy. First, it is completely uninformed on substantive grounds: The jeremiads against the nuclear accord in particular reflect a deep-seated ignorance of what’s in the nuclear deal. Second, it is completely uninformed on procedural grounds: The candidates know nothing about the diplomatic back-and-forth that produced the nuclear deal, the prisoner release, or the release earlier this week of the 10 U.S. sailors who’d somehow crossed into Iranian territorial waters.

If 48-50% of Americans really think any of these people are feasible candidates for President of this country, the sane members of this society should be worried.