For a brief moment at the start of yesterday's Republican debate, political junkies across the land collectively paused to contemplate a single question: What the crap is Alan Keyes doing on stage?

This brain-buster, made more vexing given that fellow basement-dwelling candidates Mike Gravel and Dennis Kucinich have been banned from today's debate sponsored by the same folks, can be unraveled only by combing through the eligibility guidelines established by the Des Moines Register, one of the nations most prominent and widely read ... Registers. The guidelines required, among other things, that candidates who receive at least 1 percent in an October poll conducted by the Register are to be included. Scoring a hefty 2 percent, Ambassador Keyes, who ran for president in 1996 and 2000 (and was arrested while protesting his exclusion from a debate during his '96 run), cleared that hurdle with room to spare.

Keyes then made the most of his moment in the spotlight, tucking bits of truths about The System into grenades of self-aggrandizing histrionics. Delightful as this sounds, the rumpled reporter class who so wisely shape conventional wisdom for us have gotten a little huffy about his involvement. Probably because Keyes accused several who asked what he was doing at the debate of being racists and lectured them that, "You don't get to define the process of politics in this country. You only think you do." And with that, Radar's political team thanks the Des Moines Register for their silly debate rules and respectfully asks Ambassador Keyes to turn that shit up to 11.