RUSH: Hillary and Obama have now joined John Edwards in pulling out of the Fox News Channel debate that was co-sponsored by the Congressional Black Caucus. You know what this really adds up to? You know what this is? It’s not so much fear of Fox, although it may be, but they’re opening themselves up to all kinds of questions. ‘You want to send Pelosi over there to talk to Bashar Assad, and you’ll go anywhere to talk to terrorist enemies and leaders, but you won’t go on Fox News? What are you guys afraid of?’ I think at a deeper level here, there’s an ongoing, underneath-the-surface battle for who runs the Democrat Party, and the Congressional Black Caucus has just been told, ‘It ain’t you guys. You want to get in bed with Fox…’ Howard Dean’s out there sending out the signals, and the blogosphere is sending out the signals: ‘You guys are not going to go on Fox,’ and these Democrat candidates (let’s see, we’ve got Hillary. We have Obama. We have John Edwards) have all sided with the gang trying to run the Democrat Party from Howard Dean’s side and the left-wing blogosphere.
That’s one of the interesting subtexts to all of this, but I still wonder how all of this is going to play out, if it plays out at all in the minds of the American public. That’s always what interests me, when any of these news stories come down the pike. What will the American public think with an entire party refusing to appear on a single network, and of course remember that in a presidential debate, the candidates are the stars, whoever the moderators are, they would be compromised of a cross-section. It wouldn’t just be Fox News Channel people. Even if it were, what’s so tough about answering questions? These people are not going to be doing commentary. The Fox News Channel people, the other people that might be on the moderator panel are not going to sit there, the interviewer panel, are not going to be sitting there and offer monologues or commentary or any of that. The candidates are the stars here. These guys, they can take any question you want and answer it however you wish.
I don’t know what Fox is going to do. I have no insight. Wouldn’t it be great if they went ahead and televised the debate and just put cardboard cutouts of all the Democrats who aren’t there? You know, get a cardboard cutout of Hillary. Get a cardboard cutout of Edwards, a cardboard cutout of Barack Obama and just ask them questions. Ask them questions anyway, and let the silence speaks for itself. That’s not unprecedented. That kind of thing has been done before.