Tonight is the night that virtually nobody has been waiting for. Fox News is sponsoring a Republican PR event disguised as a presidential primary debate. The participants are a collection of washouts who are taken seriously by no one and have no plausible chance of election.

Confirmed for this waste of primetime are Gary Johnson, Herman Cain, Rick Santorum, Ron Paul, and Tim Pawlenty. The list of those not participating is far more notable: Mitt Romney, Mitch Daniels, John Bolton, Michelle Bachmann, Jon Huntsman, and Donald Trump. Fox News couldn’t even get their own employees, Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, and Mike Huckabee, to show up.

Also not showing up will be the Associated Press. In an advisory published yesterday, the AP said…

“This is to inform you that The Associated Press is not planning to cover Thursday night’s Republican presidential candidate debate in South Carolina because of restrictions placed on media access. The debate sponsors, Fox News Channel and the South Carolina Republican Party, will only allow photos to be taken in the moments ahead of the debate and not during the event itself.

These are restrictions that violate basic demands of newsgathering and differ from other debates where more access was granted.”

The reason that the Fox-sponsored affair is violating the basic demands of newsgathering is that they are not a news enterprise. They are a Republican mouthpiece for right-wing propaganda. In that respect this debate is perfectly suited for the network. You can expect some of the most extreme rhetoric to be thrown around by the party’s most extreme elements.

Fox is going all out trying to salvage the event by hyping it incessantly for the past week. Every host of every program has been promoting the debate and interviewing the participants and moderators to pump up viewership. Some are making the ludicrous argument that the top-tier candidates will regret not having attended. They compare it to Rudy Giuliani’s decision to opt out of many of the early primaries in 2008. [Note to Fox: this is a debate, not a primary.] I think it will the participants who end up regretful.

I wish Fox well in promoting this event. The more people that see this circus, the better informed they will be about what a bunch of losers the GOP is harboring. And it is also likely to reflect on the unserious nature of Fox News itself. They have really gone out of their way to produce a comical sideshow that could have just been an episode Hannity, the program it is preempting.