Ace on Last Night's GOP Debate:

"I'm not buying that CNN was an honest broker here."

Was Keith Kerr's question fair? Well, sure, the question was fair. The staging of a sympathetic Hillary plant to ask it live, and seemingly without end, was not. CNN will argue they didn't know he was a Hillary plant (despite the fact it was easy enough to find out; he was found on Google to be a plant within minutes of the debate's end). But so what if they didn't know his partisan affiliation? What the hell were they doing handing the show over to him for a solid five or seven minutes anyway?

It made for sharp questioning and good drama. But if that's the name of the game, let me suggest to CNN that they allow a paralyzed veteran with limbs missing due to an IED attack similarly grill the Democratic candidates on whether they support the Democratic Congress' determination to choke off all monies needed for the military's anti-IED program. Give him the mic, live, and let him harangue the Democrats on the viciousness of IEDs, and the viciousness of them putting soldiers' lives, and limbs, in jeopardy to appease their netroots base.

Would CNN ever do such a thing? Of course not. There would be no vetting of whether he was affiliated with any campaign because there would never even be a thought of letting him grill the Democrats at all.

So CNN can fuck itself sideways with their claims of "just allowing ordinary Americans to voice their concerns." They choose which "ordinary Americans" get to ask questions; they're nothing but sock-puppets for the political agenda of CNN. The moment they begin allowing sympathetic figures to embarrass Democrats, I'll call them fair. But they won't -- the Democrats get protected, the Republicans get embarrassed.

Even the right-wing (or supposedly right-wing) questioners in these debates are chosen for their scare value. I remember at the last CNN You Tube debate -- the Democratic one -- when their question about gun rights was posed by a frankly frightening character who demonstrated a nearly sexual fascination with his weapons, calling them his "babies" (presumably, the babies he molests at night). They could have chosen, I'm sure, a dozen gun-rights questions from a dozen more reputable and more reasonable folks... instead, they put the gun-rights question in the mouth of just the sort of character that gives gun rights a bad name.

Given that a guy you wouldn't trust with a butter knife was asking if he could have all the M-16s he could possibly want for his regularly-scheduled schoolyard killing spree, it was rather easy for Joe Biden to call this nutjob what he was and say something along the lines of "You're exactly the moron I'm thinking of when I'm voting for gun control laws." And of course most of America agreed; hell, even I agreed.

RTWT.