The V.P. Debate: Luke vs. Darth

Some wag in the blogosphere yesterday forecast the vice presidential debate last night as "Heart Throb vs. Heart Disease," but it was nothing one could smile about.

It reminded us of nothing so much as an old Popeye cartoon, one of those sequences where Bluto and Popeye pound one another into the dirt like pilings, each going down equally and at the same rate of descent under the WHAM WHAM WHAMing of big meaty fists.

One of the NYTimes reporters called the debate "grim." The first 50 minutes were especially tense, when the topic was Iraq. When the subject moved to domestic issues, Cheney seemed to lose interest a little. He certainly wasn't much up for debating a Constitutional Amendment banning gay marriage.

We watched it on C-SPAN, which does not interrupt the live feed with any voice-over blather. So Gwen Ifil was sitting there on the stage by herself for what seemed like hours, and then she brought Cheney and Edwards on stage, and the collective silence continued for several more minutes, the candidates not looking at one another though they were only inches away, and nobody saying anything. The tension was palpable. And it only got worse once the talking started.

Cheney was at a tremendous disadvantage. He had to recover from his boss's poor showing last week while not revealing too much about who's really running things in this administration. But he couldn't help overshadowing El Presidente. Plus the news cycle was against him, and Gwen Ifil immediately asked about the Paul Bremer speech criticizing his conduct of the war. Cheney's stone-walling had developed a bit of a chink about Saddam's imaginary connections with Al Qaeda, as yesterday had also brought news that the CIA (damn you, CIA!) had failed to find any connection which has been the cornerstone of Cheney's little temple of self-delusion for months. I never said there was a connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda, Cheney averred at one point, apparently under the impression that we're all blithering idiots out here in TV-Land.

Edwards was on the attack from the beginning. When scolded for his own "undistinguished" Senate career -- which IS his Achilles heel -- Edwards got right back up in Cheney's face with a litany of nay votes from Cheney's own days in the U.S. House, including no votes against Head Start and the Martin Luther King holiday.

Edwards did well. He did very well against an old pro with ice water in his veins. He stood up, and he gave as good as he got. Not that it matters much.

We look forward to Jon Stewart's "take" on the debate tonight on "The Daily Show."