Dan McCarthy takes issue with Douthat's claim that the current Republican field is the worst in a generation:
Yes, there are some bizarre and unappealing personalities among this year’s contenders, but most of them are no worse than the Republicans of yesteryear. The 2012 field has perfectly orthodox ideological and professional credentials. … Yet it’s true that Republicans look more foolish than ever. Why? Perhaps because the party is more indulgent than ever of a media even more infantile than that of the 1990s. The quantity no less than the quality of debates has been degrading. Pundits have hyped nonsense polls and nonsense candidates into the stratosphere.
Douthat responds by citing the concept of "cable news candidates":
[W]hat we’ve seen in this cycle is the intersection of conservative media pathologies and mainstream media pathologies. The first has given us the rise of the cable news candidate, whose rhetoric and ambitions are geared toward a prime-time slot on Fox rather than the presidency, while the latter has encouraged the assumption that the Republican electorate is composed of fools, crazies and extremists, and therefore very likely to actually choose a cable news candidate as its nominee. Throw in a legitimately weak frontrunner, and you have the impetus for the seemingly endless series of quickly-dissipating boomlets that we’ve endured since last spring — all which will be seen in hindsight, I suspect, as sideshows in a race that was shaped more by who didn’t enter the field than by any of the non-Romney candidates who actually competed with him for the nomination.
The Dish 