Candy Crowley plays biggest loser with Obama

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 she no doubt 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.

© Selwyn Duke