There are a few reasons why I absolutely hated the Republican Presidential Debate on Sunday night. For me the biggest problem was the fact that the FOX News question askers are in such an inherently awkward position that they can’t help but to ask stupid questions that voters don’t care about. I shall explain.

Most of the techno-public and younger generations think that FOX is a conservative news station. Forget about the fact that every single study that reviews FOX’s reporting from a nonpartisan perspective (I stress NONPARTISAN, though it doesn’t really matter for this argument) finds that it is actually less partisan than the other news channels - no one seems to care about that. People believe that because the commentators on the channel are conservative (Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity), then the entire channel is skewed to the right. That’s not only ignorant, it’s downright dumb.

Okay, so that’s the base that these question askers are sitting on. They want to change that portion of the public’s view, so what do they do? They completely attack the Republican candidates for the first 30 - 40 minutes of the debate. How can guys like Chris Wallace and Carl Cameron have any respect for the voting public when they spent the first half of the debate trying to pit one candidate against another? That’s ridiculous! Why not spend this time to ask the candidates straight out, “Hey - let’s say you are President tomorrow. What do you do about [insert issue here]?” Why did their line of questioning have to be, “Candidate A says this about you. Candidate B said you’re a bonehead. How do you respond?”

Ugh. Give it up already! If the folks at FOX think that they’re going to break their stereotype as a conservative news station by trying to make the Republican candidates fight against each other during a debate, then they’re sadly mistaken. At this rate, who can blame the Democrats for not wanting to face such a pathetic line of questioning on FOX?

Thank God for Wendel Goler and Brit Hume asking decent questions!

Aside from the fact that the first half of the debate was consumed by a manufactured type of politicking that the vast majority of Americans hate, I don’t think that the candidates had good nights. Ron Paul made a few good points as he usually does (even though those points are sometimes few and far in-between). John McCain did more of his straight talking, but should NEVER have referenced the fact that he was “straight-talking.” Giuliani had a bad night - no question about it. The post-debate interviews spun the debate in Rudy’s favor, but the way he bungled the very first question of the night left a lot to be desired. Romney had a moderately okay night as did Thompson (who looks very tired and not-up-to-the-challenge on the stage).

Huckabee did a good job to get his viewpoints across and I think that he probably had a better showing that the rest of the crew. Tancredo and Hunter are footnotes at this point.

All in all we had a debate with blase candidates and poor, poor questioning by Carl Cameron and Chris Wallace. Let’s hope for a better debate next time around.