Wolf Blitzer Bombed

As you no doubt already know, Wolf Blitzer threw in the CNN-monogrammed towel in the Democrat "debate" in Las Vegas.

What happened there didn't stay there! And it's all over the internet, on both the left and the right.

Having been rather openly warned not to focus the debate on Hillary, Wolf personally backed off asking her an obvious follow-up question on licenses for illegal immigrants, though he did closely query Barack Obama on the same issue. As noted on the NRO Media Blog, Hillary front group Media Matters, even issued a list of prior warnings to Wolf and CNN, regarding what questions they could and could not ask! Wolf ended up spending much of the debate interrupting the candidates, giving Fox News Channel's Chris Wallace an opening to critique the CNN coverage the next day, as reported on "alternative news" blog, The Raw Story.

Thus, in spite of Wolfy's prior pledge to ask tough questions, the CNN towel hit the canvas within a few minutes, just as it had apparently been planned all along.

Newsbusters notes that the lefty blog, Daily Kos jumped all over the CNN coverage as pro-Hillary. Likewise Gateway Pundit. Strange bedfellows, huh?

Our prior post, suggesting some tough questions for him to ask Hillary, was of course only half in jest. We knew Wolf would never have asked anything like the questions we listed. Nor will anyone in the media.

But little did we suspect that the entire network would completely cave, by scripting the public portion of the debate, and openly toss in with the Democrats to promote their agenda! Michelle Malkin accurately calls it the "Politics of Planting" in this video replay of that portion of the debate. Contrary to his pledge, he actually stated in the lead-in that the public questioners were "undecided," openly suggesting that they were independents, though as we know now, they were nothing of the kind.

Here is exactly how he put it:

Wolf Blitzer: "White House correspondent, Suzanne Malveaux is here with us and, Suzanne, you have some, uhh, undecided voters who are ready to ask these Presidential candidates some specific questions. Let's begin right now!"

Suzanne Malveaux: "Sure Wolf, they are all very excited . . . about a hundred folks here. I've had a chance to actually meet at least, uhh, some of you here. Katherine Jackson . . . I want to start off with you . . .

And off they went! The implication of the introduction was that they had selected a few questioners from a group of about 100 or more undecided voters who showed up for the debate.
But one of the questioners -- the girl, Maria Luisa, who got stuck at the end having to ask her "fun" question to Hillary, "Diamonds or pearls?" -- made it quite clear that the entire matter was scripted well prior to the "debate." Mark Ambinder at the Atlantic laid out the details of Maria's next day "blurt" on MySpace.

Many other questioners were previously known Democrat activists, as detailed by Noel Sheppard at Newsbusters, some of them with direct connections of loyalty to supporters of Hillary Clinton, including a former intern to Harry Reid!

So let's face it, as was reported about the Harvard media study, CNN is not only the most hostile to Republicans of all the networks, it also appears more than willing to ensure that the Democrat candidates are not confronted with anything like the tough questions Wolf had promised.

Where she saw an opening CNN's Suzanne Malveaux even "amended" one girl's question in order to further drive the agenda.

Regarding Mark Ambinder's Atlantic piece, above, you'll note that well over 500 comments have since been posted. The most persistent theme among the commenters is, if debate questioner Maria Luisa was so smart, why did she not just go ahead and ask her question about Yucca anyway, once they handed her the microphone? In other words, Why did she cave in and ask her "diamonds or pearls" question? She herself addressed it in the comment section.

The comments on the article thread range in quality from quite insightful to utterly abusive.

But having read through them, our vote for the best comment posted on the entire thread was this one:

(Heard in the wings: "Say, what time did you say we put the dog up on the pony?")
Posted by Billy Beck November 17, 2007 12:39 AM

Here is the original comment as posted on Billy's blog, where, incidentally, you can pick up a ton of information on guitars.

Funny. That said it all!