For the record, I think the idea of banning Ron Paul from the debates is counter-productive. I would like to see a debate with just the front-runners, or even one-on-one debates between Romney, McCain, Giuliani and anyone else, simply because I think we’d learn a lot more than we do in these 10 man steel cage matches. So reducing the size of debates doesn’t bother me at all. But singling Ron Paul out just because he’s off the reservation on this stuff strikes me as an unnecessary admission of intellectual and philosophical insecurity. After all, by any significant political measure Giuliani won that exchange. So what’s so scary? Let Paul serve as a useful punching bag.

The only way I could see my opinion on this changing is if we learn more about the racist or anti-Semitic stuff. Indeed, I would be more sympathetic to ousting him on those grounds if this push to ban him hadn’t come up before those revelations. I do think there are some views where party discipline warrants denying a podium to a candidate at a GOP debate. Racism and anti-Semitism are such views, but libertarian isolationism isn’t.