If Rick Santorum's defense of gay rights...

...was the strangest moment in Thursday night's Republican presidential debate, the most telling was when all eight candidates admitted they would "walk away" from a debt deal consisting of $10 in spending cuts for every $1 in taxes. As one writer said, a good follow-up question would have been, "Would you accept a 20:1 deal? How about 100:1? Is there any deal you would accept?"

But conservative columnist Conor Friedersdorf put it best (my emphasis):

One way to interpret their answer is that they think tax rates are more important than deficits by a factor of more than ten. To me, that makes them deficit doves. By prioritizing tax cuts above all else, the GOP has long been complicit in growing the deficit and the debt. If all of these candidates would reject a compromise much better than anything they're likely to get as president, what good are they? Is the plan really to hold out for super-majorities in Congress that can be sustained for long enough to make deeply unpopular spending cuts that won't then be repealed once the backlash sets in? Don't they understand that those ten dollars in spending, left uncut when they walked away from the hypothetical deal, would be paid for (with interest) by future taxpayers?