Abu Wabu

Via Patterico, Jonah Goldberg serves up a brilliantly sarcastic take on the Clinton News Network's vanished credibility:

Just as revealing were the questioners who weren’t revealed to be plants. For the most part they were a motley crew of conservative caricatures. CNN’s typical “ordinary American” (translation: “scary Republican”) was a pale, gaunt, twenty-something white dude who looked like he’d spent the last year working in the sunless bunker he’d constructed out of his mom’s basement. Several of the videos were reminiscent of the sort of thing investigators discover while searching the home of slain white militiamen after a terrorist attack.

One of these young men was, literally, a bible thumper who demanded to know if the GOP candidates were as committed to “every word in this book” as he was. Another questioner took a brief break from the shooting range to ask about gun control. But he made it clear, as he cocked a shotgun thrown to him from off camera, that the candidates answers didn’t much matter because, he implied, they could have his gats when they pried them from his cold dead hands.

Another young man asked from the comfortable sovereignty of his dorm room what the Confederate Flag - which hung conspicuously behind him - meant to the men on the stage. Sadly, the guy who played “Psycho” in the movie Stripes was apparently unavailable to record a video. Still, it would have been nice if at least one of the candidates had seized on one of the numerous opportunities to say, “Lighten up, Francis.”

Goldberg's concluding paragraphs illustrate the lack of scruples that put CNN in the same company as TNR:

But there's a larger and, I think, more interesting point to be made. And it comes from CNN itself. In an official statement CNN pushed back against the critics. "The issues raised [by the] debate were legitimate and relevant no matter who was asking the questions. The vested interests who are challenging the credibility of the questioners are trying to distract voters from the substantive issues they care most about. Americans are tired of that discredited low-road approach." In another statement, they defended their choice of questions from more than 5,000 submissions based upon several journalistic criteria and, with the exception of Gen. Kerr, they stood by their editorial decisions.

Now it takes the kind of chutzpah that usually invites a lightning bolt from above for CNN to not only accuse its critics of taking the "low road approach" but to dare speak as a tribune of the American people, when they failed to even find "ordinary Americans" when it was, literally, their job to do so.

Still, they do have a point, but they may not realize how damning their defense is. First they are saying that these questions are so obvious that it doesn't really matter who is asking them. Fair enough, but doesn't that apply not just to this debate, but to CNN generally? That means the millions of dollars CNN has invested in, say, Anderson Cooper as uniquely talented at asking tough, meaningful or unique questions has been money wasted on a lie. Any pretty face can ask the questions handed to them by their producer. So why not just have Cameron Diaz ask the questions? Who needs puffed up journalists to read cue cards?

But CNN's also saying that their producers were still the ultimate arbiters of which questions got asked. With 5,000 submissions they could cherry-pick whatever questions they wanted. All that stuff about "you deciding," "ordinary Americans," and tearing down the gates was little more than show business. The "ordinary Americans" were simply props for the agenda of the same old people who always get to decide what counts as news and what doesn't. You people who thought otherwise are just a bunch of saps.

And, sadly, CNN is right on both counts.