H-R-CNN
INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Posted 11/29/2007
Media: CNN can spare us the alibis for letting Democratic operatives slip past them as questioners in this week's Republican debate. The Hillary Rodham Clinton News Network may be as dishonest as it is slanted.
All it took was a Web search to figure out that the supposedly independent retired Brig. Gen. Keith Kerr, whose video question for the candidates was chosen by CNN for the GOP YouTube debate, was a co-chairman of a Clinton campaign organization.
Yet after CNN's Anderson Cooper innocently announced "another question from a YouTube viewer. Let's watch," came a gravelly voice right out of George C. Scott's portrayal of Gen. George Patton, as Kerr rattled off his biographical data.
"I'm a retired brigadier general with 43 years of service, and I'm a graduate of the Special Forces Officer Course, the Command and General Staff Course, and the Army War College," Kerr said. "And I'm an openly gay man."
What Kerr — and Cooper — left out of his resume was not only that Kerr was this month named to a top spot in "Veterans and Military Retirees for Hillary," according to a press release from her campaign, but that he was also on the National Veterans Steering Committee of Sen. John Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign.
Kerr's question was designed to make the more socially conservative Republicans look bad — and indeed those were exactly the candidates (California Rep. Duncan Hunter, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney — two Baptists and a Mormon) directed by Cooper to answer it.
"I want to know," Kerr asked, "why you think that American men and women in uniform are not professional enough to serve with gays and lesbians."
Hunter and Huckabee stood by their opposition to an openly homosexual military, while Romney looked uncomfortable as Cooper reminded him that in the 1990s he was against "don't ask, don't tell."
CNN, however, let their Clinton shill, who was present in the audience, have the last word over the three.
"With all due respect, I did not get an answer from the candidates," Kerr said, after which Arizona Sen. John McCain noted that most military brass tell him that "don't ask" is working well.
CNN apologized, but Kerr is only the tip of the biased, unbalanced iceberg. Columnist Michelle Malkin exposed the fact that another of CNN's supposedly independent, unaffiliated questioners, who asked a loaded question about criminal punishment for women who have abortions (which was not the law previous to Roe v. Wade), actually is a John Edwards supporter — which CNN would have discovered by viewing her YouTube profile.
Malkin also found another supposedly nonaffiliated questioner, this one having publicly supported Sen. Barack Obama. Yet one more, a mother posing with her two kids, is an aide to the head of the American Steel Workers Union, which has endorsed Edwards.
Can anyone imagine CNN allowing operatives of the GOP campaigns ask questions at a Democratic debate?
Hostile questions from the other side are fine in presidential debates if they are done evenhandedly. Instead, we have the unacceptable situation of Clinton getting away with filling audiences with shills who ask softball questions, plus the establishment media sabotaging the Republican debates.
If Wednesday's debate had been staged by the Democratic National Committee, it's hard to see how the questions could have be en much different.
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