One simply has to see to believe Sean Hannity's attack on Ron Paul subsequent to the second Republican candidate debate last night. Regardless of your view on whether the US government's foreign policy was a significant contributing factor to 9/11, reasonable people would have to admit that Hannity's haranguing of Paul to the point of preventing him from even talking was just indecent.

In fact, Hannity's performance seemed almost contrived to me. Equating an overly-interventionist and destructively-aggressive foreign policy with "morality" approaches the cartoonish. I don't think there remain many Americans who still see the Iraq issue in these dubious terms (if they ever did), and I don't think Hannity's hysterical performance will convert many. It's a tough sell -- how many people care about policing the world when they can't even pay their own bills? How many care about policing the world when the government can't even provide the domestic services it promises? No, I think it was instead the claim of being at imminent risk of attack, so soon after 9/11, that garnered initial support for the war (as tepid as it was). And everyone now knows that that was a lie.

So who is Hannity fooling?

A better book-end for the debate is this segment between Wolf Blitzer and CNN, where Blitzer throws no softballs, but at least gives Paul a chance to answer to completion. The result, of course, is that Paul ends up looking eminently reasonable, and Guiliani like a buffoon.

Update: js290 sent me this segment (as well as the above CNN clip) with listeners calling into C-SPAN and incessantly expressing support of Ron Paul. It's downright inspiring.