Forget participation. ABC isn't allowing time even for any official Republican rebuttal. Republicans will have to hope they find a spot or two in the audience ABC News selects with the promise of "divergent opinions in this historic debate." ABC also promises the participation of their medical correspondent Dr. Tim Johnson, who's been a blatant cheerleader for a European-style "right" to health care.

This isn't unprecedented. ABC handed over two hours of morning airtime after Columbine for Bill and Hillary Clinton to lament our country's gun culture in 1999. In 1994, NBC News offered the Clintons a two-hour special to promote Hillary-care, paid for by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a major supporter of socialized medicine. The Democrats always seem "overprivileged" when they want to sell their programs on network news.

Skepticism is warranted when ABC promises "divergent opinions," which probably means a debate between leftists, that people who want a single-payer socialist system will be granted the floor. If the past is prologue, if Charlie Gibson has any tough questions for Obama, he'll be asking him to explain why our ultraliberal president's too much of a conservative on health care. Gibson angered President Clinton during the 1999 Columbine special by insisting he wasn't enough of a gun-banner. He said a friend of Clinton's complained the Colorado high school shooting "seared the national conscience," and yet "the president had a chance to roar on gun control and he meowed."

More conservative White Houses have not been awarded a supportive network platform. Does anyone remember that ABC prime-time special that allowed President Bush to sell Social Security privatization in 2005? Or the two-hour 2006 prime-time Bush White House special promoting the War on Terror? Try not to laugh too hard at the impossibility of such a concept.

You can just hear the protests, can't you? "Why, we can't do that! We're journalists!"

In prime time, Barack Obama is overexposed and under-challenged. If ABC wants to add any sliver of credibility to all this freely offered airtime, it will ask the president to defend adding $10 trillion to the national debt in the decade to come, and ask if the current government's priorities should really require a deficit three times the "investment" of World War II.