Even the many vile and stupid things he says are repetitive and predictable. He’s called Barack Obama a Nazi on multiple occasions, for crimes like “criticizing the insurance industry” and “wanting to host the Olympics.” Who can forget the time he idly wondered when citizens would “march down to their state legislator’s house, pull him outside, and beat him to a bloody pulp” over a Washington state proposal to regulate phosphates in dishwasher detergent? That’s quality political analysis right there! No wonder CNN hired him!

When he’s not hyperbolic and violent, he’s just wrong and lame.

And it gets no lamer or wronger than the “We are the 53% movement,” a stillborn, inadvertently hilarious right-wing response to Occupy Wall Street involving self-proclaimed members of the producer class crowing about their Randian productivity while decrying everyone else as leeches. The name was taken from the premise that “only” 53 percent of Americans pay taxes, which is true only of federal income taxes, and is true only because there are a lot of poor Americans, and a few lucky Americans who are skilled at taking advantage of Republican-supported tax loopholes.

Erickson led off the “53%” movement by declaring that he “works three jobs,” at least two of which are simply spewing a never-ending stream of risible bullshit. Other contributors to the “We are the 53%” site included a number of people who were clearly not in the 53 percent, being apparently unaware that they were clear beneficiaries of government social spending, or in one instance, being a dog.

HACKIEST 2011 MOMENT:
Surprisingly, not his 53 percent activism. The hackiest thing Erick Erickson did all year was withdraw support from an insurgent GOP candidate because his rich bosses are personal friends of George Allen. That’s the sign of a true careerist hack right there.
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(Read the introduction here. Read the 2010 Salon Hack 30 List here.)

Then there’s the fact that one former Mirror reporter has said phone-hacking was an “accepted technique” at Morgan’s paper, and Morgan has written of listening to a celebrity’s voice-mail message that was most likely obtained through the practice that’s landed other British tabloids in serious legal trouble. Morgan has issued a series of increasingly carefully worded denials.

Of course, even if he never condoned the hacking of a single phone, he’d still be an unctuous, unpleasant misogynist.

HACKIEST 2011 MOMENT:

Probably asking Condoleezza Rice, “What would you cook for me?”
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(Read the introduction here. Read the 2010 Salon Hack 30 List here.)

Not that a newsreader needs to be brilliant, or even to have a decent grasp of general information. But Blitzer’s dimness is all-too-evident on “The Situation Room,” CNN’s seemingly 16-hour-long daytime showcase for its biggest video screen, which is gamely stood in front of by a gibbering goateed moron.

Jack Shafer demonstrated how once Wolf gets a cliché stuck in his head, he can’t stop repeating it, like a baby learning English.

But the only thing worse than Blitzer’s monosyllabic idiocy is his obvious sense of himself as a very serious and important person. When he does reveal an opinion — and he’s careful not to, because he works for opinion-allergic CNN, and also he’s probably too dumb to have many opinions on the things he reads aloud — it’s the opinion of a longtime member in good standing of the very serious Washington establishment. So, for example, it is abhorrent to him that government secrets ended up in the hands of… the press. Wolf Blitzer cannot believe that journalists can just go read these secret government documents!

And let’s not even get into his decades as a paid propagandist for the conservative Israel lobbying group AIPAC. (Well, OK, let’s just link to another video of him being impossibly intellectually outmatched, in public.)

HACKIEST 2011 MOMENT:
His every interview is a master class in not managing to get anything interesting out of a subject. He often seems to be barely paying attention, as he showed when he completely muffed the famous “balloon boy” interview in 2009. But just go through his many, many Donald Trump interviews this recent campaign season for the absolute worst that cable news has to offer: A buffoon flattering a narcissistic clown with attention.
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(Read the introduction here. Read the 2010 Salon Hack 30 List here.)

The news, apparently, is that Democrats have asserted that the ad contains a distortion. Are they correct? Who knows! The CNN story prints the quote from the ad, prints the full quote, prints statements from Democrats saying the ad is dishonest, and prints statements from Romney’s campaign saying the ad is not dishonest. Then, having armed the reader with all the necessary and somewhat contradictory information, the story moves on to other issues, like how much time Romney’s spent in New Hampshire.

I am sure that CNN deputy political director Paul Steinhauser is a smart man. He’s obviously successful in the field of political journalism, a field mostly made up of smart people with good educations. But for some reason Steinhauser can’t figure out for himself whether or not this Mitt Romney ad is a distortion. Unable to decide for himself, he notes that Democrats say it’s a distortion, but on the other hand Republicans say something else. What a conundrum! Either Steinhauser is just too busy to figure out which side is right about this ad, or someone doesn’t think he’s smart enough to decide that for himself and tell CNN’s audience the truth.

This is a pretty simple case, “objective” journalists. Because this ad is objectively dishonest. There’s really no hope for any of you if you can’t say that clearly without devolving into he said-she said quotes from “both sides.”

Sparked by Newt’s complaints — and my own sense that the debate questions were poorly done — I went back and coded the questions in each debate. I divided them into five categories:

• Basic policy questions, which simply ask the candidates their positions on issues of public policy. For example, Tea Party voter Sandra Jones asked: “What would you do to get the economy moving forward? Do you have a plan? And, if so, what is it?”

• Gotcha questions, which challenge candidates by comparing a past statement or a policy position with some evidence that seems to contradict that statement. Fox’s Bret Baier asked Gingrich: “You said, quote, ‘exercise a no-fly zone this evening, communicate to the Libyan military that Gadhafi was gone, and that sooner they switched sides the more likely they were to survive.’ After the president launched military action a few days later you said, quote, ‘I would not have intervened. I think there were other ways to affect Gadhafi.’ Are you certain about the way forward in Libya and where it stands now?”

• Political questions, which quiz the candidates about the horse race or what will play well with the electorate. In the first CNN debate, John King asked Pawlenty about V.P. choices … last time around. Or, in other words, to comment on Sarah Palin: “President Obama made a pick. Sen. McCain made a pick. Who made the best choice?”

• Invitations to attack another candidate. Moderators spend quite a bit of time encouraging candidates to pick fights with each other, and selecting the topics. At the Reagan Library, Brian Williams asked Jon Huntsman, “Gov. Romney’s new economic plan calls for the U.S. government to officially label China a currency manipulator, but the Wall Street Journal editorial page says such a move would cause a trade war, perhaps. You’re a former ambassador to China. You have served four U.S. presidents. In your view, what does Gov. Romney not get about China?”

• A final category were personal questions asked of the candidates, a CNN specialty; in the first CNN encounter King asked each candidate a question such as “Leno or Conan,” and the next time Wolf Blitzer asked them what physical changes they would make to the White House.

I didn’t include the times when the moderator simply directed the same question to a new candidate or allowed a candidate a chance for a rebuttal. However, I did include it if the moderator reworded or reframed the original question. Obviously, some of these were judgment calls that others might decide differently. But overall I’m confident in my general conclusions — which match up nicely, for what it’s worth, with Newt Gingrich’s complaint.

The results? Fox asked quite a few basic policy questions — about two in five, while those topics were over half the questions asked in the other three debates. Instead, almost 30 percent of Fox’s questions were “gotchas,” as Newt correctly recognized.

CNN was lightest on the gotchas, but did ask a high number of political questions in the first debate, and had the peak number of invitations to hit others in the Tea Party debate. CNN also topped the “personal” category in its first debate, with the “Leno or Conan” questions.

So Newt is right that the moderators are asking a whole lot of gotcha questions and other items that do not simply call for policy positions.

Is he right that they should? I suspect most journalists would not agree; indeed, my reporter-heavy Twitter feed during these debates regularly filled up with criticisms of “softball” questions. And reporters are right: It should be a lot easier for a candidate to recite his or her policy positions than to explain, as Mitt Romney was asked to do, whether it constituted “leadership” for him to wait until the last minute to take a position on the debt limit talks.

But easy doesn’t necessarily mean most informative. If the audience for these debates is partisans just tuning in to the presidential contest and eager to choose between the contenders, which helps them more: learning the candidates’ basic issue positions, or seeing how they handle tough questions?

I’m even less enthusiastic about the political questions. Rick Santorum was asked whether his views on abortion are “too much, even for many conservatives to support.” For that, I’d say he’s not even qualified to answer (I’d much rather hear from a pollster), and at any rate I’m not sure that anyone is interested in his views on the subject.

As for invitations to attack, it’s natural for the moderators to give them an opportunity to confront each other, as CNN did for Tim Pawlenty and Mitt Romney after Pawlenty debuted his “Obamneycare” line. But my sense is that candidates who want to attack each other have plenty of opportunity in response to basic policy questions. It doesn’t add anything to push them to do so.

Personal questions, and even of the “Leno or Conan?” variety, are defensible. There were very few questions asked about how the candidates would conduct themselves in the White House, or how their experience made them likely to be a good president, and yet especially in nomination contests it’s likely that how they go about doing the job is probably more important than specific issue positions. Even CNN’s gimmick questions had the modest virtue of allowing the candidates to speak as real people.

The truth is that the kinds of questions that debate moderators are often drawn to are especially good for one thing: They avoid boredom for people who follow the process closely and already know each candidate’s standard stump speech and talking points. Which is fine for them — I should say, for us, since I’m certainly someone who has heard what these folks have to say — but must make for an odd experience for anyone who is just tuning in and actually wants to use the debates to educate themselves about the candidates.

If we are to have debates, however, I think the network commentators should stick to policy and personal questions. The press normally has many chances to quiz the candidates, but the debates are really a rare opportunity for the candidates to react to each other — and the more we can get that, and the less we get of the moderators, the better. That doesn’t mean that questions should all be as broad as the Tea Party question about the economy quoted above; a good moderator can balance broad areas of interest with specific topics in order to elicit answers that really can distinguish candidate positions.

But save the gotchas for when the candidates come on the Sunday chat shows and the rest of us are sleeping in.