Join us here tonight for running commenting on the last debate.

Update: An omen? Romney blimp crashes.

Well, it’s time, folks. Wish us luck. I’m glad there aren’t any more of these. They wear me out.

* They are back to the blue and red ties, like the first debate. oh noes!

MIDDLE EAST

Part One: Libya

Mittens; Stuff in the Middle East is bad.

Ah Hah. Moderate Mitt is back. We can’t kill our way out of this.

The President: What we are doing.

Romney needs to be pressed to explain what he would do.

The President is recalling the stuff Romney has said over the last few months.

Yes, Mittens, he was accurate.

Mittens is lying about what he said in the past. He’s being the Mitt from the first debate.

Syria

NOW Mitt doesn’t want to go to war with anybody. He’s saying exactly what the President said. Please, ask him what he would do differently.

Mittens seems to think we can replace governments whenever and wherever we like.

I think Obama is hampered by the fact that he understands there are limits to what the United States can do. Mittens doesn’t get that.

Richard Adams: “Funny, for all the Republican rhetoric about what US foreign policy should be in the Middle East, here Mitt Romney is all about bringing everyone together in Syria, holding meetings and so on. Flow charts, maybe? This all sounds suspiciously milque-toast and leading from behindy. He’ll be going to the UN security council next.”

NEWS FLASH! Mittens is in favor of world peace! He’ll be competing for Miss World next.

OMG; he’s blaming American weakness on the debt.

AMERICA’S ROLE IN THE WORLD

Mittens is doing his best to bring the debate back to domestic issues.

OMG; he’s going through his five-point economic plan again. DRINK NOW.

How do you think it is going? To someone who really isn’t knowledgeable I suspect it’s just … confusing. A wall of words.

FYI: Massachusetts has ranked at the top of the education systems for decades. It’s a liberal state full of people willing to pay taxes to support good schools.

Here we go. Mittens is going to scuttle Obamacare to pay for a bigger military.

I think Obama is scoring on this section.

Mittens: Trust me. I’m a businessman.

Fewer horses and bayonets. We have submarines now. Hah! We’re not playing a game of battleship. SCORE.

It’s like the first debate but with roles switched. Mittens is saying how he’d do everything just like the President.

Mittens is struggling to keep smiling.

THE APOLOGY TOUR! Smack him down, Mr. President!

The centrifuges of death are spinning!

Smack him, Mr. President! I think Mittens just looks pathetic.

Mittens is getting irritated. Push him! He blows his cool easily.

AFGHANISTAN AND PAKISTAN

NOW Romney is saying he will withdraw from Afghanistan by 2014. He is saying Afghanistan is successful.

Mittens: Pakistan is important! Brilliant.

Drones. Mittens won’t attack the President on drones, although that’s one thing he could be attacked on.

Is it almost over?

CHINA

Mittens, clue: Government underwrites most of the research that leads to scientific and technological breakthroughs.

Now he’s claiming he wouldn’t have hurt the car industry.

INTERRUPT HIM, DAMMIT!!!

This debate probably won’t help or hurt either candidate that much, but overall I think the President was sharper and firmer than Romney, who was flustered and, well, lied. And he’s going to be called on some of this stuff. Expect some scrutiny of what Mittens just said about the auto industry, which was a flat-out lie.

Now for what we’ve all been waiting for — what does Chris Matthews think?

I’ll say one thing — these debates have been moderated by two (old) men and two women, and the women KICKED ASS. The men appeared to struggle to stay awake. Bob Schieffer was a notch less passive than Jim Lehrer, IMO, but neither one did all that well, and the questions generally were lame.

Update: I see that Obama has won about four flash polls. So I’m going to bed; see you tomorrow. Keep talking if you’re up to it!

Mitt’s foreign policy expertise:

This one hasn’t gotten much attention, but I kind of like it:

One last debate. You know the drill.

Update: Just to get us in the mood …

Nate Silver keeps advising to not get excited over any one poll, and here is an example. A few days ago a Pew poll showed Romney closing the “gender gap” and drawing equal to President Obama in support among women. Much crowing came from the Right.

But Nate Silver says today that, in fact, the gender gap is almost as extreme as it has ever been. Even factoring in the Pew poll, women support the President over Romney by 9 percentage points. Romney is 8 points ahead of the President among men, however. So there’s a significant gap.

I’m getting really irritated whenever I see a headline declaring which candidate is up or down someplace, and it’s based on only one poll.

It’s been hard to sort out the claims and counter-claims being made about the attack in Benghazi and how the Obama Administration has responded. But here are some must-read backgrounders:

Kevin Drum, “The Benghazi Controversy Explained.”

Erich Lach, “How the Benghazi Attack Became a GOP Talking Point.”

I recommend reading both articles. Together, they provide a clear picture of what probably happened in Benghazi; what the Obama Administration said about it, and when; how the Right, and particularly Fox News, has fabricated information to blur the tragic event into a scandal to hurt the Obama Administration.

Kevin Drum’s summation:

Bottom line: There were conflicting reports on the ground, and that was reflected in conflicting and sometimes confused reports from the White House. I don’t think anyone would pretend that the Obama’s administration’s response to Benghazi was anywhere near ideal. Nevertheless, the fact is that their statements were usually properly cautious; the YouTube video really did play a role; the attack was opportunistic, not preplanned; and it doesn’t appear to have had any serious connection with al-Qaeda. It’s true that it took about ten days for all this to really shake out, but let’s be honest: ten days isn’t all that long to figure out what really happened during a violent and chaotic attack halfway around the world. I get that it’s a nice opportunity for Republicans to score some political points in the runup to an election, but really, there’s not much there there.

See also David Ignatius, “CIA documents supported Susan Rice’s description of Benghazi attacks.”

Related post: “Fox News cost Mitt the debate” by Jonathan Bernstein. Bernstein’s overall point is that Republicans have a “policy deficit” and must resort to running on scandals.

When Ronald Reagan took office, conservative think tanks were ready with a host of ideas for transforming what government did and the way it did it. As recently as the 2000 campaign, George W. Bush campaigned on, for example, No Child Left Behind and a faith-based initiative. Does Romney have anything similar he’s talking about during this campaign? Not that I’ve heard.

What he’s substituted for policy is scandal, on the one hand, and symbolism, on the other.

Republicans’ reliance on a scandal framework is most obvious in their attacks on Barack Obama. The stimulus is reduced in this point of view to “Solyndra.” Energy? One pipeline to Canada.

Most of the time, there’s almost no real attempt to construct an argument against actual policies, to treat government programs proposed by the president as policies that one might agree or disagree with. That’s not always true – a lot of the arguments against the Affordable Care Act, and some of the case against the stimulus, really were policy-based. But more often Republicans have tried to frame their attacks around scandal.

Even when Mitt says he has a plan, it’s a plan with no details. For example, the famous five-point economic plan isn’t a plan at all, but a list of five things that would be helpful to grow an economy, accompanied by only vague suggestions for arriving at those five things.

It’s not so much a plan as a gimmick intended to represent a plan. Sort of like the stacks of paper Republicans in Congress trotted out in 2010 to show that they had a health care plan. And do you remember George Bush’s “National Strategy for Victory” from 2005? Republicans don’t do plans; they do props.

This is precious. Steven Hayward writes at Power Tools that news media are turning against President Obama.

As I predicted last week, the media are starting to turn on him. Right now it is mostly showing up on the editorial pages in the ranks of unsigned endorsement editorials. Papers that endorsed Obama enthusiastically in 2008, like the Orlando Sentinel, are coming out for Romney.

On Memeorandum, Hayward’s rant was grouped with the following editorials:

The Salt Lake City Tribune endorses … Obama.

The Denver Post endorses … Obama.

The Tampa Bay Times endorses … Obama.

What’s that you said, Hayward?

Hayward is very excited that the New York Observer endorsed Romney. This shouldn’t be surprising, however. The Observer was purchased by trust-fund baby Jared Kushner in 2006, after which its better writers — the ones I liked, anyway — walked out. It used to be an intelligent read; now it’s mostly an upscale tabloid.

But isn’t it just like a wingnut to see a couple of endorsements (or one poll) as the beginning of a tsunami.