Rudy Giuliani, he didn't say anything at all. Neither did John McCain or Mitt Romney or Fred Thompson. That's because they weren't anywhere to be seen, or heard.

As you've no doubt heard, the Big Four in the Republican primary race decided to blow off the PBS debate on issues facing black Americans. All four apparently had, uh, scheduling conflicts. For those inclined to believe the excuses, here's Newt Gingrich's take: "Any of them who give you that scheduling-conflict answer are disingenuous. That’s baloney.”

"Disingenuous" is a long word for "lying." And baloney -- note to David McSwane -- is just one thing you can be full of.

Or you can read the real story -- hard-earned truth -- from seven noncommissionered officers who have spent the last 15 months in Iraq and who bravely wrote this op-ed for The New York Times.

In any case, I'm with a friend who's definitely in the anti-Clinton camp who tells me, "It scares the hell out of me that she might actually get elected." When I ask him why she scares him more than the other Democrats do, he thinks and then admits he doesn't have a good answer.

I do. It's Karl Rove's fault. OK, it's not all his fault. He didn't invent the red-blue divide in this country or the anger that goes with it. Rush Limbaugh loved to pillory Hillary long before any of us heard of Karl Rove. It wasn't Rove's fault that the Republicans impeached Bill Clinton either.

But Rove encouraged the division. He nourished it. He won elections with it. He didn't invent the idea of the wedge issue - but you have to love what he did with it. Who else could have made a war against 9/11 terrorists into a battle to see which party could get to 50 percent plus one?

It would be funny if it weren't so, well, funny. (He moved to the golf course home, he told the Rocky's Chris Barge, because he wanted to get back to the land. And, I guess, to the sand traps.)

If you read the article, you can tell that Beauprez still thinks he has a political future. Which raises the question: What is washed-up Republicanese for delusional? And does it involve a pitching wedge?

And he even used my picture. How much better publicity can you get? At least he didn't have his boys from Fox stalk me outside a grocery store.

He was quoting from a column I wrote about Ward Churchill. And, as you know, nobody can pound a dead horse -- or a discounted lefty professor - the way O'Reilly can.

Well, it didn't. It wasn't a flop. It was just a gimmick that amounted to nothing more than all the other debates.

I'm not saying the just-folks questions were any worse than watching Chris Matthews trying to talk over a line-up of presidential contenders. I'm saying the "funny" stuff wasn't particularly funny, and while the moving stuff could be "moving," it didn't elicit any "moving" answers from the candidates, who, in the format, didn't have to engage each other, didn't have to engage the video questioners and, basically, didn't have to do anything more than be engaging for 30 seconds at a time.

This is the first debate I'm not covering live. But I figure a YouTube debate is one that should be seen on TV.

Some things you can expect to see. And not to see.

But it wasn't his last move. Reid, without product placement, has now said that if Republicans don't want to vote on pulling out the troops, then they won't vote on anything Iraq-related, for a while anyway.

This is what can happen when you make people stay up all night. It means that there may not be a vote any time in the near future on the defense appropriations bill. And it also means that Ken Salazar's proposal to adopt the Iraq Study Group won't get a vote. Not yet anyway. He had lined up something like 14 sponsors -- presumably while they were awake. But the Democrats aren't in a compromising mood right now. It has taken the Democrats a while to catch on, but most Americans are done with this war.

Some people think Bush should be impeached. I think that's going too far. For me, he should just be put on double secret probation.

According to Bush's reading of a White House report on progress in Iraq, maybe not all is well -- but a heck of a lot is. His reading of the 18 benchmarks puts it at an 8-8-2 (8 satisfactory, 8 unsatisfactory and 2 mixed) record. If you're a football coach, 8-8-2 might or might not get you fired, depending on whether the owners (that would be we, the people) think you ought to at least make the playoffs.

It’s not his ex-campaign manager, Terry Nelson. Or his ex-adviser and maybe ex-friend, John Weaver. Or the rich Republicans who won’t give him money. Or the profligate campaign spending that, according to the New York Times, left him humiliated – and also with less than $2 million in cash on hand.

The problem with McCain’s campaign is that many conservatives don’t like McCain, many religious conservatives really don’t like McCain and many of the moderate-to-liberal independents – the ones who loved McCain in 2000 – don’t love him any more.

I don’t have to tell you why.

It turns out -- as it so often does -- that the answer can be found on the Watergate tapes. Thompson, it turns out, was a snitch back when Scooter was still a law student, only dreaming of inglorious leaks yet to come.

Thompson first came to notice on the national scene as a young Republican lawyer working for the Senate Watergate committee. He's the person who famously asked Alexander Butterfield if he was aware that Nixon had a taping system in the Oval Office.