Not that Donahue's show is all academics and no theatrics. On the first two nights, round-table discussions about a possible war with Iraq and the consequences of the PATRIOT Act often disintegrated into impossible-to-follow shouting matches.

Yet there was one rare "aha" moment, thanks to conservative guest Cliff May, former communications director for the Republican National Committee. In a debate about the PATRIOT Act, May insisted that during the post-Sept. 11 dragnet, which detained nearly 2,000 people, "no constitutional rights have been taken away."

When guest Bill Goodman, from the Center for Constitutional Rights, pointed out that American citizen and alleged "dirty bomb" suspect José Padilla has been held without access to a lawyer and without being charged with a crime, May shot back: "Do you really think he's innocent?"

Rarely are such crass anti-democratic attitudes publicly revealed, but they were on Donahue's program.

So much has been made in the press of a proud liberal like Donahue stepping into the conservative cage of talk television. But always the nice guy, whose sincerity still seems genuine after all these years, Donahue doesn't want to try to out-shout anybody. Instead, he's deftly using his power to shift the focus of the debate for 60 minutes each night.

It was telling that Donahue's first guest on the inaugural show was Scott Ritter, the former United Nations weapons inspector turned dove, who argued the United States today has no basis to declare war on Iraq. An ex-Marine and a proud Republican who spent years inspecting Saddam Hussein's arsenal, Ritter has been surprisingly absent from the national debate about a new war with Iraq. Donahue fixed that oversight in one night.

Tuesday night's program worked better since it was centered around a single theme, unlike Monday's debut, which hopped around from war with Iraq to the Pledge of Allegiance to a possible baseball strike. Anchored by Ben Franklin's quote, "Those who would sacrifice freedom for security will get neither," the program focused on the PATRIOT Act, a chilling new domestic intelligence-gathering law that has been virtually ignored by television news outlets in recent months. (The only problem being that Donahue rendered the quote inexactly and wrongly attributed it to another of the founding fathers, James Madison.)

Donahue invited Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., the only Senate member who voted against the PATRIOT Act, to discuss the legislation and how it relates to the FBI's national dragnet of mostly Middle Eastern men thought to have terrorist ties. "There have been serious abuses of civil liberties of people who did absolutely nothing wrong," the senator said.

According to a search of Nexis' electronic database, here is how many times in the six months before his "Donahue" gig that Feingold was on a national broadcast to discuss the PATRIOT Act or the people detained since Sept. 11: 0.

Truth is, in his first two nights on the air, Donahue did more to expand the perimeters of our national debate than Alan Keyes did during his last two months on MSNBC.

And that's something that might really upset Goldberg and Coulter.

This story has been corrected since it was first published.

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