Chris Matthews couldn't top his material. Dull people make for dull programming. Mitt out-smiled Chris, and both said nothing of consequence. Mediocrity all around.

And this is why the republicans really prefer a coronation to an actual primary race. With a presumptive front runner, he can just stay above the fray, mouth platitudes and never engage in substance to reveal how offensive republican ideals really are.

Now that they have to compete for votes, they actually feel like they have to answer questions sometimes, and the answers are almost uniformly alarming to anyone who cares about his fellow man.

From Thompson's "ok to fire gays" to others advocating an "aggressive" foreign policy (ie more wars) to endless faith in the free market fairies to more fortress america fences and berlin walls.

It's awful, what these people really believe in when you get right down to it.

i can see why republicans are so dissatisfied. they'll be staying home in droves on election day of 2008 if that's the best they have. which one said the repeal of roe vs. wade would be the "greatest day in american history"? yikes.

If you missed the first portion of C-Span's Washington Journal this morning, you missed a hilarous Republican only session of 30 minutes for calls on the debate. From first caller to last, the wingnuts signaled their displeasure. Not with their field of candidates per se but with "liberal" Chris Matthews and the other "liberal" hosts from Politico. One caller came right out and said that Bill O needed to host the next Repug debate. Unbelieveable.

because it was yet another sign that the republicans STILL don't get it - that they still don't recognize that 06 was not an anomaly, that a significant portion of the voting public actively and forcefully repudiated everything they (the republicans of the Bush era) stand for, and that the more they stand by the mistakes they've made for the past 6 years and promise they'll make them again, the more likely it is that they'll have their asses handed to them again in 08 and beyond.

They can continue to pander to their basest base all they want, and my guess is, they'll end up with the dead-enders in the 25-30% range, and that will be damn near all they'll get. But even at that, none of the candidates with the possible exception of Brownback (and do we really want a President BROWNBACK, fer cryin' out loud?) showed the ideological and wackjob-religious purity that the wingnuts require in their candidates. I'd imagine that the true wingnuts came away from last night's master debate with "none of the above" as their choice.

So yeah, let 'em all rant on like this for 18 more months. It's our only hope for some kind of return to sanity in America. Let them think they still have their fingers on the pulse of the people, and that they understand what America wants.

Then, pull the little lever in the voting booth, and in your mind, imagine it's a flush handle sending them all swirling down the bowl.

BTW, it WAS Fred Thompson who wasn't there and who Joan was suggesting won last night's debate. Just wanted to clear that up for amspeck. A little irony, dontcha know...

Freedom, for the entire history of this country, has never meant freedom for all (white men only), just like "right to life" doesn't apply to all (war and death penalty), or going back a few thousand years, "thou shalt not kill" (unless you're killing Phillistines).

This group of Republicans is in this lineage of selective ideals. So full of self-contradiction. As soon as you look under the hood, or challenge any of their high-minded declarations, they fall apart and stutter.

You make an excellent point, and one that some Americans have always seen as a truth.

However, many Americans don't bother to parse the rhetoric, or understand the foundations of our Democracy, they just can't wait to wave their hands in the air for some mind-numbing generality spoken in the most manly fashion by their favorite new hero.

Also, Chris Matthews is an idiot. One of the most casually superficial "news" people ever. Mr. Softball.

The Republican party does stand for freedom. You just have to understand what those freedoms are.

They don't stand for the individual liberties that we often talk about when we say freedom. When Tommy Thompson says employers should be able to fire employees who are openly gay, he stands for the freedom of the employer to discriminate against his employees.

Similarly, the Republican party stands for the freedom of the federal, state, and county governments to force a woman to have a child. They stand for the freedom of governments and schools to force religion on people. And they stand for the freedom of the federal government to put people in secret prisons indefinitely without trial or access to an attorney.

This kind of misdirection has been around for a long time. I often hear people talk of the Texas war of Independence as being about freedom. They won't say exactly what the freedom was they were fighting for: the freedom to own slaves. The US Civil War was about the freedom to own slaves in the western territories.

Whenever someone talks about freedom, I have learned to ask "freedom to do what?"

I would be far more impressed when seeing and hearing those who still support the war in Iraq if the candidates led a swearing in ceremony for their family members joining up to fight this war. steve, usn, ww2

Apparently Salon employs a Net nanny that takes umbrage at the phrase spelled out by the first seven letters of the word you are trying to type, i.e. hot b*tt.

Indeed.

What's to like?

Why can't one send the word h o t b u t t o n ? It gets shortened to "on" dang it.

*...doesn't have to be a on* issue.

...you, Joan Walsh, for your engaged analysis. Though Giuliani might not win any constituency with his talk about abortion, if he becomes the nominee, he will be doing this country a service simply by showing that abortion doesn't have to be a on issue for this country and the Republican Party doesn't have to be so monolithic about it. Sam Brownback deserved credit for saying that he would support a pro-choice Republican candidate.