Before he was Gilligan, Bob Denver played the lovable beatnik Maynard G. Krebs. The character was known for iconic catch phrases such as, “I’m getting kinda misty…”, “You rang?”, and perhaps his most famous, “Work!”

It was a reflexive reply whenever the word work was mentioned, even innocuously. Krebs, the prototypical hippie, felt that work was the ultimate four letter word.

Sort of the same way Senator Obama feels about “Debate!”

Barack Obama’s campaign released a letter this afternoon from campaign manager David Plouffe to the Commission on Presidential Debates only agreeing to the traditional three sanctioned fall debates and single vice presidential forum.

“Due to the late date of the two parties’ nominating conventions, and the relatively short period between the end of the conventions and the first proposed debate, it is likely that the four commission debates will be the sole series of debates in the fall campaign,” Plouffe writes.

Sounds good, but I ain’t buyin’ it.

The response from the McCain campaign was deadly accurate:

“We understand it might be beneath a worldwide celebrity of Barack Obama’s magnitude to appear at town hall meetings alongside John McCain and directly answer questions from the American people, but we hope he’ll reconsider,”

In other words,