By Selwyn Duke

You might think that with all the recent focus on media bias
in debate moderation, Candy Crowley would have minded her p’s and q’s in last
night’s presidential debate. But clearly, she doesn’t even know the ABC’s of
her job.

Her most obvious transgression was chiming in and
contradicting Mitt Romney’s assertion that Barack Obama did not label the
Benghazi attack an act of terror when he spoke in the Rose Garden on Sept. 12.
Crowley’s unwarranted meddling was significant. The apparent lies surrounding
the Libya tragedy are a huge scandal for Obama, and, with the mainstream
media’s failure to aggressively cover the story, the debate was a golden
opportunity to get the truth out. Enter Crowley’s Passion. She snuck into the
ring, without Obama even tagging her, and hit Romney from behind with a chair
while the ref, Crowley’s Brain, was looking the other way. And, as was
established later, she was wrong. It was, as Thomas Sowell wrote
recently, a display of what Obama himself is guilty of: confident ignorance.

Also striking, however, is that most of the questions asked
clearly played into the liberal agenda. This isn’t surprising since they were
chosen by Crowley herself. And we should ask: why was one liberal in a nation of 308 million people empowered to
unilaterally choose the questions for a presidential debate? There couldn’t
have been a conservative choosing half of them? And how about, perish the
thought, having a conservative as a debate moderator one of these days?

In fact, it would have been laughable if not so tragic, as
Crowley was clearly out of her depth and ended up deep-sixing the truth. She
chose a question about the male-female wage gap, assuredly oblivious to the
fact that women do not get paid less for the same work; they get paid less for
lesser work. As Carrie Lukas points out here,
the wage gap is due to the sexes’ different lifestyle and career choices, not
discrimination. It isn’t surprising that Crowley would advocate for the
feminist agenda, however, since her performance last night leaves little doubt
she owes her position to affirmative action.

Then there was the question about so-called “assault
weapons.” Gun control hasn’t been an issue since the 2000 campaign, when Al
Gore’s embrace of it likely cost him that very close election and the Democrats
decided to find a new situational value. In Obama’s case, this manifested
itself in the statement, “I believe in the Second Amendment” (cue the Joe Biden
smile and head shake). Yes, I’m sure, in the way the Devil believes in God.
Anyway, Crowley undoubtedly doesn’t know that what have been labeled “assault
weapons” aren’t really assault weapons, and, regardless, the Clinton-era ban
didn’t even outlaw those; rather, it prohibited the sale of certain
semi-automatic firearms that had a certain combination of relatively
inconsequential features (I explain this here).
So you were conned, Candy.

Some will now say that Crowley was trying to con the
audience, but the truth with the left is that they deceived themselves long
before deceiving others. A prerequisite for baying your own biases is knowing
they exist, and liberals don’t. Being relativists, their locus of values is not
without but within; thus, they quite naturally see themselves as defining
reality. This leads to deification of the self, to the viewing of oneself as
the true center. It also doesn’t help that media types live in a bubble of
babble, associating only with other liberals and imbibing nothing beyond The New York Times and her satellites.
Hey, that’s the whole world, isn’t it?

This is why, mind you, liberals will so often swear up and
down that they’re “moderates”; it’s why they’ll say with a straight face that
there’s no bias in the mainstream media. For they truly are in the center — of
their own little world.

It’s a land of Lilliputians, of small men, small minds, and
small questions that will beget a small civilization.

       © 2012 Selwyn Duke — All Rights Reserved