Rudy just raved about the Chinese ability to get 40 nuclear power plants built. They know how to handle protest.

He admired the French too. Quelle scandale!

Romney just spoke of the health plan set up in "our state" without naming that state.

Huckabee maintains that what he really meant by Bush's "arrogance" and "bunker mentality" was "not enough troops" against "Islamofascism," and declares to Romney, “I supported the president and the war before you did.”

It's jolly that we have a clear winner in Iowa, small as its caucuses are and arcane as their rules are. Let's consider the caucuses, for a moment, a big focus group, and (almost) leave it at that.

It's even jollier that, as the Republicans touch up the corner they've painted themselves into, the Democratic winner seems bent on pitching a big tent, knows what organizing is for and what money is for, and can lilt in preacherly cadences and talk "coming together" while showing many signs of knowing that corporate and Pentagon power will have to be confronted. Inspiration is not nothing for a transformative politics. It is very far from nothing.

So let's say, for the sake of argument, that we accept that when Obama talks about coming together, he hasn't forgotten that the "conservative" movement that bulldozed its way to collective disaster with George W. Bush has to be defeated--ringingly, enduringly defeated.

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No doubt Chris Matthews thinks he's giving voice to his robust internationalism, his ecumenical spirit, and his understanding of how intently the wider world turns its lonely eyes to Iowa, when he touts tonight's putative Democratic winner, a "son of Kenya" with "Third World" cred, as "Barack Hussain Obama." I can't know what's in his heart, let alone his mind, but could it be that the rise of this man plain weirds him out?

Do we hear him, or anyone speak, of Michael Dale Huckabee, John Sidney McCain, or Willard Mitt Romney?