"THIS is CNN..." (Includes Updates)

Hugh Hewitt has about the best summary of the CNN Democrat (I mean) Republican debate last night that I have read:

[...] Last night's fiasco was so thorough that it will take a while to settle in just how damaging it was to CNN's reputation as a news organization. From the awful judgment displayed with the opening guitar serenade through the preposterous selection of topics and questions right to the stark reality that CNN either was easily and completely manipulated by the Dems with planted question after planted question or were totally complicit in the hijacking of a Republican debate designed to serve Republican primary voters about who ought to be the Republican nominee. The network is either incompetent in a way no serious news organization should be, or wholly captured by agenda journalists of the left.

No serious anchor would want to be where [Anderson] Cooper is today, at the center of a vast train wreck which cannot be explained away as the inevitable result of the sudden appearance of big news in a difficult setting, as with hysterical Katrina coverage of bodies stacked in freezers and gun fights in the Superdome, or the result of the input of bad data, as with the early call of Florida for Gore in 2000.

No, this [is] premeditated mediocrity. The network had months to prepare and consider and execute. But even with all that time, it lacked the minimal talent necessary to produce a serious debate about important issues using new technology. All it could deliver was a carnival of bad taste, trick questions, and full frontal left wing bias.

UPDATE: Michelle Malkin has got CNN dead to rights for just how tricked up these questions and questioners really were. I am so glad that this is coming out, because the American people deserve better than the double standard they have been spoon fed by those elites who "know better" than they do. I actually heard Tom Brokaw call out CNN today on the Hewitt show, and Brokaw is no right winger.

My issue with last night is not so much the questions asked; yes many questions were over the top--hell, the guy with the Bible was little more than a sneering heckler. But a President should be expected to know how to handle a hostile questioner. In a perfect world it wouldn't bother me to see Republicans pose the questions in a Democrat debate and vice versa. After all, the idea is to see how a potential candidate can handle the pressure. I think that sort of debate would be a big improvement over what we have gotten to date, because (on the Democrat side anyway) most of the questions have been layups. Pointed questioning would serve the public good. However the kind of heckling questions we saw last night were nothing more than a lame attempt to brainwash the viewers in to thinking that the vast majority of Americans are partisan Democrats.

The problem in this instance with CNN is that for its Democrat YouTube debate, the questions were from a partisan Democrat perspective. In the CNN Republican debate... the questions were from a partisan Democrat perspective. So we are supposed to believe that a network with the resources like CNN can only find good video questions from the political left of the YouTube generation? Have they not been paying attention to bloggers like Michelle Malkin, Allah, Bryan Preston, and Mary Katherine Ham? Please.

No, this was truly a disgrace; and to pretend that it was not done purposefully is a flat out lie to the people of the United States; every bit as much so as were the Rather lies and The New Republic's lies. CNN has now joined MSNBC and the network of Rather as selling out completely to Soros and the MoveOn left. It was pathetic, and a really sad day for American journalism. William Randolph Hurst would have been proud.

UPDATE: More from Glenn Reynolds.

UPDATE: Meanwhile an NBC reporter covering Sarkozy calls Bush a "monkey." Nice.

UPDATE (RELIAPUNDIT): MEMEORANDUM HAS A COMPLETE ROUNDUP AND GATEWAY HAS SOME OTHER GREAT LINKS.