Portrait of a man with two conflicting goals. On the one hand, he doesn’t want to say anything that’ll tarnish the conservative cred he’s built lately by ripping on Obama and endorsing Hoffman. On the other hand, he doesn’t want to hand Scarborough et al. a bludgeon by excommunicating Snowe from the party. He could have answered with the point I made earlier, that the GOP is undergoing an Obama-induced transformation by which its litmus test will be fiscal rather than cultural, but if he goes there then he walks into the question of whether Snowe hasn’t failed that test by helping get ObamaCare through committee. A sticky wicket.

Do stay with it, though, or else you’ll miss Arianna Huffington lecturing T-Paw on the dangers of … rigid ideological purity. Yes, really.