How Much of a Set-Up Was Crowley's Libya Question? (Jack Cashill)

AmericanThinker.com ^ | 10/19/2012 | Jack Cashill

[The White Hut Dog Eater]

Anyone who thinks that Romney will get a chance to bring up the Benghazi cover-up in the final debate is sadly mistaken.

Bob Schieffer has announced that the debate will 90 minutes long, divided into six 15-minute segments as follows:

- America’s Role in the World
- Our Longest War — Afghanistan and Pakistan
- Red Lines — Israel and Iran
- The Changing Middle East and the New Face of Terrorism – I
- The Changing Middle East and the New Face of Terrorism – II
- The Rise of China and Tomorrow’s World

Benghazi is in Africa, not the Middle East! Libya has been suspiciously left out of the discussion altogether.

If Romney brings the Benghazi subject up, Schieffer will promptly intercede and claim that Romney has strayed off topic, and besides, Benghazi was already discussed and settled in the last debate.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

There are many who saw it for what it was -- a planned set-up. I'll go one step further and say the 47% comment, said without time for Romney's rebuttal, was also a coordinated plan and was msterfully done.

If the GOP continues to cave in accepting only liberal moderators, they shouldn't complain about interruptions and being given less time as it's almost a given!

It is a given that it is impossible to even try to be objective without being open about the reason you know of why you might have incentives to not be objective. And it is a given that journalists claim objectivity for journalism, and hence ultimately for themselves.

It follows that journalists are not being open about their own motives, or else they could not be claiming to have no motives (by claiming to be objective). And it follows from that that journalists are not even trying to be objective. And even if they actually think they are trying, by giving "both sides of the story," they don’t even know what the sides of the story really are - and don’t know that they don’t know.

Thus the “objective” journalist, consciously or (worse yet, not even realizing it) falls in with those who reinforce journalism’s biases in favor of criticism - and "good intentions” -over performance. And calls the favorable names such as “liberal,” “moderate,” or “progressive.”

The Republican candidate wants the debate and the national TV audience which journalism can provide. Journalism doesn’t have to give it to him, and doesn’t want to be doing the Republican any favors. They agree to the debates only on the condition that one of their own be the “objective” moderator.

If you want it bad, you’ll get it bad. And the Republicans do. Every time.

The only solution I can see is an extension of the law requiring that political commercials be aired without editorial control by the broadcasters. Congress should make it a condition of FCC licensing that broadcasters televise political debates. And that such debates be moderated only by a chess timer controlling the candidates’ microphones such that each candidate yields the floor to the other when he wants to conserve his own time more than he wants to talk. Such debates should also allow notes and laptop computers by means of which to display Power Point presentations (provided that such information be sourced online).

IMHO that would minimize the utility of sophistry and emotional appeals, and promote the use of facts and logic in debate. But Journalists must be required to carry such debates, because they have no reason to want to do it. Be it never so clearly in the public interest.

We could even hope that candidates as egregious as Obama-Biden would be so clearly vulnerable in that debate format that the Democratic Party would have to consider nominating actual patriots . . .

[editor-surveyor]

>> “can you imagine if Rush was the moderator?” <<

.
Mark Levin.