I'm waiting to get on a conference call with Clinton campaign officials, who, no doubt, will again defend their attacks on Barack Obama by claiming they have no choice but to respond to his criticisms of Hillary and Bill Clinton. But many of their attacks have been disingenuous. On a similar call yesterday, Mark Penn, her chief strategist, blasted Obama for saying as a candidate for the Senate in 2003 that he would not vote for Iraq war funding and then doing so after he entered the Senate. But there's a problem with that shot: as a candidate, Obama never said he would never vote for Iraq war funding; he said he opposed the war spending bill then pending for several reasons. The Clinton camp has legitimate criticism it could toss at Obama. The experience issue is a real one. But the Clinton crowd continues to mix real and phony attacks, pissing off some Democrats but succeeding strategically by keeping Obama bogged down in an acrimonious mudwrestle. I wonder what they'll come up with next. Meanwhile, allow me to cross-post my take on the recent GOP debate, which first appeared on MotherJones.com. Bottom line: they were nice to each other but, boy, did they mug the truth.

At Thursday night's Republican presidential debate, the GOP contenders did their best not to make any news. No one attacked anyone; no one disagreed on any major policy matter--except regarding a proposal to establish a national catastrophic insurance fund that would back up private insurance firms. (Rudy Giuliani, playing to Florida homeowners, voiced his support for it; Mitt Romney supported the general notion; John McCain attacked legislation that would set up such a fund as a $200 billion boondoggle.) Generally, the candidates made up a chorus for tax cuts and fighting--make that, winning--the Iraq war. (Then there was Ron Paul.) At times, the candidates hailed their rivals. It was so.... un-Democratic. No nastiness--even though McCain and Romney, essentially tied for first place in the Florida polls, have been hurling negative ads at each other. (A Romney ad assails McCain for flip-flopping on tax cuts; a McCain spot blasts Romney for...flip-flopping on tax cuts. McCain is actually comparing Romney to John Kerry.)

If you were forced to pick a winner--and in the absence of policy disputes, the debate was all about the horse race--you'd probably have to choose Romney, who seemed quasi-commanding and who this night, for some reason, looked more like Hollywood's idea of a president than usual. But no candidate hurt his own prospects. That doesn't mean, though, they didn't come out with some whoppers. Here's a sampling:

* Moderator Tim Russert asked McCain about a comment McCain had supposedly made--"I know a lot less about economics than I do about military and foreign policy issues; I still need to be educated"--and McCain shot back, "I don't know where you got that quote from; I'm very well-versed in economics." Well, McCain did tell the Baltimore Sun, "The issue of economics is something that I've really never understood as well as I should." So much for being "well-versed."

* Asked whether it was un-American for U.S. banks to seek infusions of billions of dollars in capital from foreign sources, Giuliani said there was nothing wrong with that as long as "they're transparent." Giuliani, though, still refuses to be transparent about his own multi-million-dollar business dealings, declining to release information about the clients and foreign officials he has worked with as a consultant.

* McCain said that the invasion of Iraq was justified because Saddam Hussein was "hell-bent on acquiring" weapons of mass destruction. Actually, he wasn't. Saddam might have desired WMDs. But for years prior to the invasion, the Iraqi dictator had suspended his WMD program and done nothing to pursue WMDs, according to the final report of Charles Duelfer and his Iraq Survey Group.

* Mike Huckabee, voicing his support for Bush's invasion of Iraq, said that just because the United States didn't find WMDs in Iraq that "doesn't mean it wasn't there." The aforementioned Duelfer report--and Duelfer took over the Iraq Survey Group as a hawk who had believed Saddam possessed WMDs--made it clear that Saddam not only had no weapons in the years leading up to the war, he had no WMD program. In other words, there were no WMDs to be found in Iraq--period.

* Romney praised Bush for mounting the Iraq war and making sure al Qaeda could not gain "a safe haven" in Iraq "for launching attacks against us." That was certainly not an issue prior to the invasion. Saddam had no operational ties with al Qaeda. And now there's little, if any chance, that the small and unpopular al Qaeda outfit in Iraq could take over Iraq, pushing aside the Shiites, the Sunnis, and the Kurds.

* Romney claimed that under Hillary Clinton's universal health care proposal, everybody will get their coverage "from the government." Here's how Clinton describes it: "If you have a plan you like, you keep it. If you want to change plans or aren't currently covered, you can choose from dozens of the same plans available to members of Congress, or you can opt into a public plan option like Medicare." That's not a government-only plan.

* Huckabee said that Americans "ought to be able to respect people who don't have any [faith]." Yet in a book he co-wrote in 1998, Huckabee huffed, "Men who have rejected God and do not walk in faith are more often than not immoral, impure, and improvident (Gal. 5:19-21). They are prone to extreme and destructive behavior, indulging in perverse vices and dissipating sensuality (1 Cor. 6:9-10)." That just doesn't come across as a respectful attitude regarding people who don't have faith.

But the candidates sure did behave nicely.

The recent news about GOP presidential back-of-the-packer Ron Paul--that on Monday alone he raised $4 million from 20,000 new Internet donors--got me thinking about...Dennis Kucinich.

Ron Paul is an out-of-the-box Republican. He opposes the Iraq war and has blamed 9/11 on a U.S. foreign policy designed to perpetuate "worldwide imperialism." As a libertarian, he has advocated the legalization of drugs and has voted against numerous government programs (including education for disabled kids).

Kucinich is an out-of-the-box Democrat. He advocates establishing a Department of Peace. He favors a single-payer national health insurance program. In the House, he introduced articles of impeachment against Dick Cheney.

Paul speaks for a slice of conservatives; Kucinich speaks for a slice of liberals. Both are offbeat, driven-by-principles characters. (You've heard about Kucinich and the UFO.) Yet Paul rakes in the campaign moolah, while Kucinich runs along almost on empty. As of the end of September, Kucinich had raised $2.1 million, of which he had spent $1.9 million. (And he was carrying nearly half a mil in debt.) As of that point (prior to his November 5 "money bomb"), Paul had collected $8.3 million, and he had $5.5 million in cash on hand.

The question is, why does a champion of libertarian conservatism attract significant financial support, while a champion of progressive notions is stuck in the poor house? No one should expect either Paul or Kucinich to match the tens of millions of dollars bagged by the front runners or to become contenders within their respective parties. But Paul has tapped his constituency. Kucinich has not.

It may well be that progressives are more satisfied with the leading Democrats (particularly Barack Obama or John Edwards) then libertarian conservatives are with the main Republican wannabes. After all, each of the Dems now oppose the war, while Paul is the lone antiwar voice within the GOP contest. It could also be that progressive Democrats are more pragmatic than libertarian cons and find it easier to live with the conventional liberals of the Democratic Party. Libertarian conservatives apparently cannot stomach the conventional conservatives of the Republican Party.

Still, the Paul-Kucinich comparison causes me to wonder if there is just more energy within antiwar, screw-the-government libertarian circles than within impeach-Bush, downsize-the-Pentagon progressive quarters. At the least, the libertarians are more eager to put their money where their candidate is--and let the political free market work its merriment.

JUST YOU WAIT. Yesterday, I noted that the war has yet to emerge as a main point of contention in the 2008 election. That's because Democrats basically agree it's time to reverse course in Iraq and GOPers (except Ron Paul) all back George W. Bush's stay-the-course policy. Consequently, there hasn't been much significant debate within each nomination contest. But a new CNN/Opinion Research poll says that 68 percent of Americans now oppose the war--an all-time high. Only 31 percent approve of Bush's adventure in Mesopotamia. Surprisingly, this poll came after the White House, GOPers on Capitol Hill, and other war cheerleaders--in the wake of General David Petraeus's congressional testimony--pumped up the volume on the surge-is-working chorus.

So consider this: can a GOP candidate for president win if he is backing a war opposed by seven out of ten voters? If these numbers hold, you can expect the war to be the primary point of engagement between the two nominees next year. And good luck to the Republican standard-bearer and his party comrades running for the House and Senate.