Wednesday, October 15, 2008 | Contact: Colleen O’Boyle (703) 683-5004
CBS Host Trashes Palin As a “Down and Dirty...Attack Dog,” Then
Expects to Be Seen as Fair Moderator
Bob Schieffer Tilted Left Against Bush in 2004
This
year’s final debate moderator, CBS’s Bob Schieffer, clearly did not
take pains to appear objective before the debate. He opened fire on
the October 5 Face the Nation by denouncing “the Palin factor... a
campaign that's turned down and dirty. Down in the polls, the McCain
campaign has found a new attack dog.” After the opening music, he
returned to the hatchet-woman line: “She took after Barack Obama in
a style reminiscent of Spiro Agnew when he was Richard Nixon's
running mate.” He asked if the Republicans were going to get
“nastier and nastier.”Schieffer also failed the fair-and-balanced test in a review of the
debate he moderated in 2004. Six questions came from the left.
Another three dared Bush to disagree with the liberal media’s
definitions of acceptable views. Only three questions to Kerry came
from a more conservative direction. Here are some examples of
questions to Bush:
No to Social Security privatizing:
“You have proposed to fix it by letting people put some of the money
collected to pay benefits into private saving accounts, but the
critics are saying that's going to mean finding a trillion dollars
over the next ten years to continue paying benefits as those
accounts are being set up. So where do you get the money? Are you
going to have to increase the deficit by that much over ten years?”
Ban those assault weapons: ”Mr.
President, new question, two minutes. You said that if Congress
would vote to extend the ban on assault weapons, that you'd sign the
legislation. But you did nothing to encourage the Congress to extend
it. Why not?”
Parroting Kerry: “He said, and this
will be a new question to you, he said that you had never said
whether you would like to overturn Roe v. Wade, so I'd ask you
directly: Would you like to?”
Are you a religious nut? “You were
asked before the invasion or after the invasion of Iraq if you'd
checked with your dad, and I believe, I don't remember the quote
exactly, but I believe you said you had checked with a higher
authority. I would like to ask you: What part does your faith play
on your policy decisions?”
By contrast, here are some questions
to Kerry:
Tax hikes are essential: “You
pledged during the last debate that you would not raise taxes on
those making less than $200,000 a year....How can you or any
President, whoever is elected next time, keep that pledge without
running this country deeper into debt and passing on more of the
bills that we're running up to our children?”
Hike the minimum wage: “The gap
between rich and poor is growing wider. More people are dropping
into poverty. Yet the minimum wage has been stuck at...$5.15 an hour
now for about seven years. Is it time to raise it?”
Kerry vs. his church: “The New York
Times reports that some Catholic archbishops are telling their
church members that it would be a sin to vote for a candidate like
you because you support a woman's right to choose an abortion and
unlimited stem cell research. What is your reaction to that?”
Is Bush to blame for lost jobs? “You
know, many experts say that a President really doesn't have much
control over jobs. For example, if someone invents a machine that
does the work of five people, that's progress. That's not the
President's fault. So I ask you: Is it fair to blame the
administration entirely for this loss of jobs?”
It’s easier for a pundit to call the
Democrat the winner when the moderator’s questions lean strongly to
the left.
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