I usually manage to find a way to avoid candidates' debates, despite that familiar tugging feeling that I really should watch them. But when my girlfriend and I stumbled across the second Republican debate while flipping channels at about 12:30 a.m. tonight, we were sucked in immediately. From moment to moment, as the questions rolled on and the camera flashed from candidate to candidate, we grew more and more appalled and disheartened.

It wasn't so much the opinions on display; it was, all things considered, a more diverse mix than you'd expect. There was just something ugly going on. A question about a possible terrorist scenario unleashed some genuinely creepy responses. I braced myself for the inevitable, unbearable "24" reference, and I didn't have to wait long. John McCain, to his credit, stood firmly against torture. But his plea for the importance of decency to your enemies didn't make much of a dent; the others took it as an opportunity to bleat about presidential responsibility. Mitt Romney's sneering machismo left a particularly bad taste in my mouth.

Then one of the moderators turned to Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, who hadn't said much during the evening. "Congressman Paul, I believe you are the only man on the stage who opposes the war in Iraq," he noted. "Are you out of step with your party? Is your party out of step with the rest of the world? If either of those is the case, why are you seeking its nomination?"

Paul responded with an astonishing defense of the Republican Party's ancient tradition of "a noninterventionist foreign policy." When the moderator asked if Sept. 11 hadn't made that ancient tradition irrelevant, he continued: "There's a strong tradition of being anti-war in the Republican party. It is the constitutional position. It is the advice of the Founders to follow a non-interventionist foreign policy, stay out of entangling alliances, be friends with countries, negotiate and talk with them and trade with them.

"Just think of the tremendous improvement - relationships with Vietnam. We lost 60,000 men. We came home in defeat. Now we go over there and invest in Vietnam. So there's a lot of merit to the advice of the Founders and following the Constitution."

Paul even brought up the sacred name of the party saint, Ronald Reagan, recalling his warning against meddling in "the irrationality of Middle Eastern politics," which had inevitably stirred up the venomous sentiments that gave ammunition to bin Laden's vicious henchmen. After all, he asked, what would we think "if China was doing this in our country or in the Gulf of Mexico? We would be objecting. We need to look at what we do from the perspective of what would happen if somebody else did it to us."

It was a truly startling moment. Paul couldn't have wrecked the mood more if he'd simply heaved a bomb into the hall. His crime, of course, was to take the supposed precepts of the Republican Party - a modest-sized federal government, a foreign policy without imperial ambitions and adherence to the beliefs of the Founders - seriously. He was speaking a different language than any of the other candidates, and you could feel the entire room slow to a halt, trying to absorb what had just been said.

"Holy shit," I muttered to Alyson, barely able to believe what I'd just heard.

Then Rudy Giuliani ("Mayor Giuliani," the moderator kept calling him, reminding me of the judge who kept calling William Jennings Bryan "Colonel" in Inherit the Wind) stepped in to rescue the moment. He'd been hanging back so far in the debate, keeping a straight face and choosing his words carefully. But his liberal social policies weren't doing so well with this South Carolina audience, so he leaped on Paul's words like a starving man going after a freshly grilled steak.

"That’s an extraordinary statement, as someone who lived through the attack of September 11, that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq. I don’t think I’ve heard that before, and I’ve heard some pretty absurd explanations for September 11th.” Giuliani blurted out the first words of his rebuttal; by the end, as the applause swelled about him, he seemed as imperious as Mussolini. All you had to do was mention That Day, and the great man felt himself to be a Great Man again; sweep all that complicated business away and revel in the presence of the savior of a city. If only you would let him be the savior of a nation!

Then he stuck the knife in: "I would ask the congressman to withdraw that comment and tell us that he didn't really mean that." A bully's taunt, and an especially vicious one coming from the party frontrunner and aimed at a virtual unknown.

But Paul didn't back down: “I believe the CIA is correct when it warns us about blowback. We overthrew the Iranian government in 1953 and their taking the hostages was the reaction. This dynamic persists, and we ignore it at our risk. They’re not attacking us because we’re rich and free, they’re attacking us because we’re over there.”

Giuliani sputtered. But the moderator quickly changed the subject, sensing that a truly vicious storm was about to be unleashed, sweeping the carefully arranged debate off its tracks and plunging it into total chaos. For party debates were not designed to argue over the very purpose of the party itself. To question the president is one thing; to suggest that the party itself has gone astray - that is truly unforgivable.

As the debate ended and Sean Hannity and Alan Colmes presided over the postdebate debate, the official line was that Rudy Giuliani had stolen the show with his dazzling retort to the contemptuous Ron Paul. His response was "from the heart," Giuliani burbled to the grinning twosome. Giuliani's response was "excellent," said John McCain, on next - after all, America was at war with an "evil force," he added. Another commentator popped on, citing results he'd garnered from talking to people in the crowd, whom he couldn't name, of course; the consensus, he said, was that Paul had disgraced himself by suggesting that "America" was responsible for 9/11.

At the bottom of the screen, a number invited the viewer to text-message their vote for the winner of the debate. Shortly after 11 p.m., the first results of the text-message poll came in. In the lead, with 30 percent, was none other than Ron Paul.