Call Me Cynical, But…

…I am deeply skeptical of the CNN/YouTube Presidential debate scheduled for Wednesday evening. On a personal level, I like CNN; I’ve rarely worked with a company whose employees are as congenial. But CNN’s commitment to the left side of the political spectrum has been getting stronger and stronger. So it makes me nervous to read that a team of “top journalists at CNN’s political unit” has been poring over thousands of questions submitted via YouTube to select the 40 that will be asked in the Republican debate:

“The questions are funny. Some of them are striking. Some of them are sad. They are incredibly meaningful,” said Sam Feist, CNN’s political director. “You watch hundreds of these questions and you really get a sense of what’s on people’s minds.”

I have a sneaking suspicion that “what’s on people’s minds” is the same as what’s on CNN’s mind: bashing Republicans.
You can watch excerpts from a few of the YouTube submissions, selected by CNN, here. (They are all available at the YouTube site.) The questions that CNN found interesting are mostly of the “Have you stopped beating your wife?” variety. For example: “What are you going to do to return the civil liberties to the American people and stop these outrageous acts on our security and our privacy?” (Incredibly, the woman who asks this question is so courageous that she appears in her video undisguised, despite living in a police state.) Or this one, from a man who says he’s a gay registered Republican and concludes: “but a vote for you is a vote against my family.”
Somehow I doubt that we’ll hear the kinds of questions most Republican voters have in mind, like: “What makes you the best person to beat Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama?” It could be a long night.
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