"Shoddy" and "despicable"

That's how WaPo teevee critic Tom Shales summed up the performance of ABC's Charles Gibson and George Snufalufagus at last night's Democratic Presidential "debate." I couldn't agree more:

For the first 52 minutes of the two-hour, commercial-crammed show, Gibson and Stephanopoulos dwelled entirely on specious and gossipy trivia that already has been hashed and rehashed, in the hope of getting the candidates to claw at one another over disputes that are no longer news. Some were barely news to begin with.