Here’s the whole interview from tonight’s “Countdown,” five of the six questions for which evidently came from dKos after Olby spent the past week flogging Stephanopoulos for stooping so low as to lift material from a partisan source like Sean Hannity. Aside from that bit of Olbypocrisy, he didn’t do too bad of a job. Granted, he let her drone on and on, and naturally he equated the Osama reference in her new ad to fearmongering, but he did at least manage to resist what must have been a terrible urge to turn this into a faux-outrage grandstanding session for his nutroots fans. That’s progress, I guess.

The Iran question’s at 5:35. Her answer is fine — deterrence, deterrence, deterrence — but I don’t see how it gels with what she has to say about fears of a regional arms race if Iran gets the bomb. That’s a perfectly reasonable fear, but does she mean to suggest she’d extend our nuclear umbrella from Israel to Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the rest of the Sunni states in order to obviate the need for them to develop their own nukes? Being drawn into a nuclear war to defend Tel Aviv is something Americans might tolerate; being drawn into one to defend Riyadh is something else. If that’s not what she means, then … what? How does her threat of “massive retaliation” do anything to dissuade an arms race?

If you can’t spare time for the whole clip, at least skip ahead to 16:35 and watch her laugh nervously as Olby lets his, ahem, objectivity drop for a moment and asks her how she could do something as unforgivable as accept Richard Mellon Scaife’s endorsement.

Update: Ben Smith has a partial transcript. She is indeed seriously suggesting an American/NATO nuclear umbrella for the Kingdom: “In order to forestall [an arms race], creating some kind of a security agreement where we said, no, you do not need to acquire nuclear weapons if you were the subject of an unprovoked nuclear attack by Iran, the United States and hopefully our NATO allies would respond to that as well.”