As the “To YouTube Or Not To YouTube” debate rolls on, I must ask another question: Just exactly what aspiring presidential pachyderms is Jim Geraghty seeing?:

On the continuing discussion of whether Republicans should hold a YouTube debate, Hugh Hewitt looks at some of the submitted questions and concludes that the exercise would be an endless succession of moonbat-generated ambush pieces. But where he sees risk, I see opportunity.

Wouldn’t we love to see a Republican candidate respond to a 9/11 “Truth”er?…

Good example - Entry 2,944 asks Mitt Romney, “Since you are a Mormon, a certain percentage of your salary goes to the Mormon Church. Now, there’s a conflict of interest there, if you are elected president, that means taxpayer dollars will go to the Mormon church by people who didn’t vote for you. What do you think about that?”

I think this man is a moron….Mitt Romney would hit that one out of the park, and Hugh of all people knows it.

I think almost all of the candidates could take a ridiculous question from Moonbat America and handle them with ease. Americans generally don’t like snide, sneers, or insults. Any candidate who decried it, and put CNN on the spot by asking them to justify why they featured a snide, sneering, or insulting question, would be appreciated.

To answer my (first) namesake, sure, I’d love to see a GOP candidate slap around ignorant lefty nutbags; yes, Romney could bash an anti-Mormon question into the third deck; and of course, almost all the candidates could take each offering of moonbattery, shine it up real nice, turn that sum[well, you know] sideways, and shove it straight up their YouTubes.

But would they?  I’m not convinced the answer is in the affirmative.  I think every last one of them, save possibly for Giuliani and Thompson (if he ever de-schnieds himself), would try to soft-pedal their answers in order not to “offend” or come off as “arrogant” or “distant” or “dismissive” of the thoughts [snicker] of what Lisa Fabrizio implicitly referred to today as “Peter Pan America“.  And Rudy aggression would, I think, be easily twisted, fairly or unfairly, into debilitating gaffery.

I still find myself unmoved by either side of this hobby horse spitting match.  I’d love to see Geraghty’s scenario, but don’t think it would ever happen.  But I also can’t dislike Fabrizio’s contention that this “M-TVization” of American culture in general and politics in particular is not just annoying to those of us who still take such things seriously but is, in its celebration of rampaging, facile ignorance, dangerous to the fabric of American democracy itself in the long-term.  Jonah Goldberg may be on to something, conceptually at least, if not necessarily in every detail.

Mayhap-it-is-and-mayhap-it-isn’t tongue-in-cheek theorizing.  But the re-maturing of America has to start somewhere; perhaps snubbing this exercise in political karaoke is as good a place as any to start.

Besides, anybody who would make up their minds to vote Democrat next year based upon a GOP refusal to be “You-Tubed” fifteen months before the fact either (1) will end up not voting because they had to hang out at the mall and American Idol was on that night, or (2) probably wasn’t going to vote Republican anyway, or (3) will be out on a catamaran or something because he thought they said “boating,” not “voting”.

BTW, can somebody let Patrick Ruffini know that his running a de facto online telethon to try and save this turkey is becoming a weird synthesis of dorkery and zealotry?  And that if the best argument he can muster for it is that the GOP candidates can do damage control in advance, it isn’t very persuasive?