CNBC debate moderator John Hardwood, left, argues with Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, right, during the third Republican presidential debate on Wednesday Oct. 29, 2015. (Photo: Screenshot)
So CNBC’s John Harwood is not only unashamed of his disgracefully biased moderating of the GOP debate, he’s doubling down — entrenched as a five-year-old boy guarding his Halloween candy.
After the debate he tweeted, “GOP debate in 2015 enriched my understanding of challenges @SpeakerBoehner has faced and @RepPaulRyan will face.” I assume he was not speaking complimentarily of these “challenges.”
In an interview, Harwood insisted he was justified in asking Donald Trump if his campaign was a comic-book version of a presidential campaign. “There is no one on that stage,” said Harwood, “who actually believes you can send those 11 million people out of the country. There is no economist who believes that you can cut taxes 10 trillion dollars without increasing the deficit. It is simply a set of discussions that is not connected to the real world we live in.”
Silly me, I thought Harwood was talking about Trump’s legendary bombast, not his policy proposals. Is it the moderator’s place to show contempt for a candidate’s policies and depict them as fantastical? Besides, when did debt reduction become the liberals’ concern, much less their priority, and even less their acid test for assessing the merits of an economic policy?
You really want to talk about the deficit? How about Harwoodian liberals’ surreal defense of President Obama’s reckless stimulus and other spending, his unconscionable waste on uber-fantastical green projects, his intransigence on entitlement reform and his demonstrable lies on Obamacare?
You want to cite your vaunted economists, Mr. Harwood? How many of them accurately predicted the budgetary effects and premium increases of Obamacare? How many of their predecessors believed that John F. Kennedy’s or Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts would increase revenues while keeping inflation in check? And while we’re on the subject of your allegiance to reality and your commitment to debunking fantasies, Mr. Harwood, why don’t you explain to us why you haven’t assailed President Obama and Hillary Clinton for their manufactured lie that the Benghazi attacks were prompted by a video? For calling the terrorist attack at Fort Hood “workplace violence”? For playing semantic games with “boots on the ground” in Syria? Who is it that has trouble with reality?
Here’s a dose of reality: Obama has doubled the national debt during his tenure and he would have spent substantially more but for tea party pressure on the GOP to rein him in. If we don’t restructure our major entitlements they will — not might — go belly up, which will have devastating consequences on real people’s lives.
Cloistered beltway liberals obviously have no idea what Americans outside their bubble think — or are so contemptuous of it as to dismiss it as insane. They believe that anyone who rejects the apocalyptic theology of the man-made-global-warming cult is a science-denying knuckle-dragger. It couldn’t possibly be that the “science” they cite is bought and paid for, tainted by peer pressure, based on questionable models and often steeped in corruption. Leftists are the ones bastardizing and politicizing science to advance their agenda.
Why else would they have predicted doom in the ’60s from global cooling, switched to global warming to conceal the egg on their faces, and then recently have descended into the shameless ambiguity of “climate change”? Have these fear mongers ever answered the charge that even if we implement all the socialistic, Luddite, Draconian measures they and their fellow traveling globalists advocate, it won’t make an appreciable difference in reducing the global temperature in a century’s time? Their hubris is as stunning as (SET ITAL) their (END ITAL) avoidance of reality.
Have pseudoscience-deifying leftists ever apologized for the flagrant failures of their doomsday predictions of the last half-century? Have they apologized for the embarrassing predictions of Paul Ehrlich in his “The Population Bomb”? Or for Ted Danson, who predicted more than 25 years ago we had 10 years to save the oceans?
Don’t be ridiculous; being a liberal means never having to say you’re sorry. These men are more likely to be sainted by the Global Warming Church than ridiculed by their enablers.
Many mainstream liberal reporters are so ensconced in their echo chamber that they are convinced their subjective political views are self-evidently and objectively true and everyone else is extreme, delusional, reality-challenged, science-illiterate or just plain evil. That’s how they delude themselves into believing they’re journalists and not glorified partisan cheerleaders.
Even with their limited contact with the outside world, how can they be so devoid of self-awareness and blind to the legitimacy of contrary opinions?
I fully acknowledge my own conservative bias and make no apology for it — but admitting it doesn’t relieve me of my duty to state the facts correctly. To me, there are conservatives and liberals and all kinds of shades in between. To them (not every liberal, but the smug journo types), there is the reality-based culture, and there’s the rest of the world — you know, conservative talk radio; Fox News; the Republican Party; the tea party; patriots; most of the South; and people who believe in American exceptionalism, the United States Constitution, limited government, traditional morality and God.
