One of the biggest tools the conservative punditry uses to make itself look like underdogs is to complain that the librul media is out to get them. It's almost always on display on every Fox News or Laura Ingraham type program, but it's on DEFCON1 during GOP presidential debates. Candidates like Newt Gingrich, exploited this attack plan on the main stream media perfectly in 2012, to his limited advantage.
Gingrich: I'm astounded that CNN would take trash like that and use it to open a presidential debate.
It's a tried and true method for conservatives to avoid discussing topics they have no interest in engaging in. In this year's debate schedule, conservatives said they were so angry at being asked gotcha questions, that had a meeting to decide to either boycott debates or try and make the networks comply to their wishes and turn debates into presidential forums.
Now let's forward fast to the last GOP debate of 2015 on CNN.
Here's what Hugh Hewitt asked Ben Carson:
Hewitt: We're talking about ruthless things tonight. Carpetbombing, toughness, war. And people wonder, could you do that? Could you order airstrikes that would kill innocent children by not the scores, but the hundreds and thousands? Could you wage war as a commander in chief?
Thousands of innocent children, really? I've never heard a more ridiculous and offensive question in my life put to any presidential candidate and to my ears it appeared that Hewitt was trying to embarrass and portray Carson as weak on our national security.
If Wolf Blitzer, Anderson Cooper or any other MSM journalist had asked Carson this question, he may have walked off the stage and you could be assured that that journalist or moderator would have been vilified in the conservative press unmercifully for their entire career. Reince Priebus would have held a press conference to castigate them and probably threatened to cancel every debate scheduled on that network (outside of Fox News) until after 2016.
To the audience's credit, they booed Hewitt for then asking the same question again as a followup to Carson, when he didn't get the answer he was looking for.
Hewitt: So you are OK, with the deaths of thousands of innocent children and civilian...
Audience starts booing...
Hewitt: It's like...
(Boooo)
Carson to audience: You got it...
Hewitt: That is what war,, Can you be as ruthless as Churchill was...
Yet, after an initial push of WTF, we heard nary a peep out of the conservarazzi about Hewitt or the questions. Are they so attuned to only Liberal outrage that they can only hear it when they are directed to by the Mark Levin's of the right?
Why is that?
If it wasn't for the insistence of the RNC, an establishment Republican hack like Hugh Hewitt would never have been asked to be part of any election debate coverage.
On the December 15 edition of NPR's All Things Considered, host Audie Cornish explained that "The presence of Hugh Hewitt came out of a demand by the Republican Party to change the way the debates are conducted." The segment featured Sean Spicer, a chief strategist for the RNC, who said, "The party needed to get more in control of the debates," which included the demand for conservative moderators. NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik called the demand "a policy without precedent" and reported that CNN "did agree to the RNC's hardball play"
Because of his inclusion on CNN's debates, Hewitt is parlaying that into repeated appearances on NBC's Meet The Press and his contributions have been just as embarrassing.
When Trump was criticized for saying that he saw thousands of Muslims cheering the 9/11 attack in NJ, he was also called to the carpet for it, but there was Hewitt ready to support him with the most hackneyed defense in the history of punditry.
Hewitt: Trump supporters are like Lincoln Chafee: blocks of granite. And they are not moving easily. And they're not going to move over the 9/11 story. And fact checkers are themselves perceived to be agenda driven, in many respects. And they would like to see an equal amount of the time given to Hillary Clinton's claim to being under sniper fire in Bosnia or trying to join the Marine Corps or any of her, as are given to Donald Trump. But here's the key thing. Elizabeth Loftus is a professor at the University of California Irvine who has done a TED Talk on memory, which people have to watch. Because memory is different from facts. You cannot fact check memory.
"You cannot fact check memory." WTF is he talking about? Maybe you can't fact check something you saw when you're five years old, but in 2001, you certainly can fact check real events.
Still the point is that if Conservative voters and pundits don't care about myopic questions from conservative commentators then they've forfeited the to right to complain when Republican candidates are asked tough questions that hey feel are out of line.
