“The questions we asked were tough and fair and appropriate and relevant and what you would expect to be asked in a presidential debate at this point,” he said. “The questions we asked…are being debated around the political world every day.”

"We decided to focus at the top on the issues that had been at the center of the debate since the last debate. Everything we brought up in that front section had not come up since the last debate. And they all focused on the same theme -- which candidate would be a stronger Democratic candidate in Novembber."

"This is the core question for the campaigns, and a lot of Democratic voters right now. That's why we decided to lead with it."

As always, they justify their vapid gossip by patronizingly claiming that it's what the little people are interested in -- all grounded in their condescending fantasies about the political assessments of the salt-of-the-earth simpletons who comprise the voting masses -- but this sort of childish, barren yapping is, in reality, representative of nothing other than how our empty Beltway media thinks.

That has been the dominant media theme for the last two decades in our political discourse, and particularly in our national elections. Leave policy and ideology to the side. Just ignore it. What matters is that Democrats and liberals are weak, effete, elitist, nerdy, military-hating, gender-confused losers, whose men are effeminate, whose women are emasculating dykes, and who merit sneering mockery and derision. Republican right-wing male leaders are salt-of-the-earth, wholesome, likable tough guys -- courageous warriors and normal family men who merit personal admiration and affection.

The Republican Party pioneered by Lee Atwater, Roger Ailes, and Karl Rove will redeploy these same personality-based themes in the 2008 election because it is all they know and, more important, because nothing has yet ended the efficacy of such deceitful strategies. A shallow and gossipy press continues to eat it up.

The most petty Politico attack began on April 16, 2007, when former New York Daily News reporter ben Smith, assigned to cover democratic presidential candidates for The Politico, published an item regarding John Edwards' haircuts. The item was titled "The Hair's Still perfect," and at the top displayed a large informal photograph, grinning widely.Underneath the photograph, Smith wrote" How much you ask [sic] does it cost to look like that?"

GOP operatives repeatedly referred to Edwards during the 2004 campaign as "the Breck Girl," a slur disseminated most helpfully by the New York Times political reporter Adam Nagourney. Nagourney, in a front page Times article at the height of the 2004 campaign, actually granted anonymity to his "sources," whom he described as "Bush officials," to sling that emasculating insult at Edwards. (In this same ignominious article, Nagourney mindless parroted the same anonymous cowards as saying that Kerry "looks French," leading to that "observations" becoming a favorite anti-Kerry insult of the national media throughout the campaign.)

Three years later, in April 2007 --- in the midst of the Edwards hair "controversy" --- Nagourney wrote in the New York Times about his 2004 hit piece, sheepishly acknowledging the significant role the "looks French" and "Breck Girl" attacks he published played in demeaning the personalities of Kerry and Edwards during the election:

Our story may have had the result of not only previewing what the Bush campaign intended to do, but, by introducing such memorably biting characterizations into the political dialog, helping it.

It apparently took Nagourney three years of deep contemplation to realize that turning over the front pages of the New York Times to anonymous partisan smear artists might actually end up bolstering their smears and cementing them in our national political dialog.