Now that the first of the GOP presidential debates is history, I offer some thoughts.<\/p>\n
First, that this event turned out to be the highest rated non-sports cable show ever is due exclusively<\/em> to Donald Trump.<\/p>\n Anyone with any doubts about this need only ask themselves: Who even remembers <\/em>the first <\/em>of the GOP presidential debates of 2012? Even some of us political junkies didn\u2019t realize that it had even been on until well after it was over.<\/p>\n Twenty-four million people tuned in to watch, not Fox, not Megyn Kelly, but Donald Trump.<\/p>\n More people tuned in to watch Trump than tuned in to watch Jon Stewart\u2019s farewell to The Daily Show.<\/em><\/p>\n Second, this being so, Fox News generally, and the moderators, Chris Wallace, Brett Baier, and Megyn Kelly, owe Trump an eternal debt of gratitude.<\/p>\n Kelly received more speaking time at the debate than did any other <\/em>candidate\u2014including<\/em> Trump. And courtesy of her dust up with Trump Thursday night, she has received more press than every other candidate\u2014except, obviously, for Trump.<\/p>\n Third, to this last point, while Democratic Party apologists in the left-wing media lavished praise upon Kelly and her colleagues, this is because the latter ran the debate no differently than the manner in which they would have run it.<\/p>\n That is to say, the Fox moderators didn\u2019t moderate at all.<\/p>\n Rather, they stocked up on \u201cgotcha\u2019 questions.\u201d<\/p>\n MSNBC\u2019s Joe Scarborough agrees with [GOP Chairman] Reince Priebus\u2019 decision to deny left-wing networks, like the one that employs Scarborough, the opportunity to host a GOP debate. He explains that \u201cthe idea was to get news outlets\u2026that would ask legitimate questions about policy instead of gotcha questions.\u201d<\/p>\n Instead, Fox did the job that MSNBC would have done.<\/p>\n Breitbart <\/em>quotes Scarborough: \u201cThere wasn\u2019t a single question asked of the Republican front runner that dealt with jobs, that dealt with Iran, that dealt with ISIS, that dealt with the economy writ large, that dealt with foreign policy writ large.\u201d<\/p>\n To be fair, there were indeed some reasonably fair, tough questions that Kelly, Baier, and Wallace posed to (some of) the candidates. However, in the further interest of fairness, there is no denying that, as Mark Levin put it, they and their employer set out to host a \u201cNational Enquirer debate, and not a Republican Debate.\u201d<\/p>\n Take, for example, this gem of a question posed by Baier: Which candidate would not consent to refrain from running as a third party candidate in the event that he didn\u2019t receive the GOP nomination?<\/p>\n Everyone knows that Trump alone among the candidates has refused to rule out a run as a third party run. That Baier posed this as the very first <\/em>question of the evening revealed Fox\u2019s anti-Trump prejudices while setting the tabloid-esque tone for the rest of the event.<\/p>\n Since Trump is the GOP\u2019s frontrunner\u2014no other candidate even comes close; and since it is also common knowledge that both Republican politicians and such Fox rock stars as Charles Krauthammer and George Will (among others) continually dismiss and mock Trump, Baier and company may as well have asked of all of his competitors: \u201cIn the event that Trump secures your party\u2019s nomination, do you pledge now to endorse him?\u201d<\/p>\n Particularly Kardashianish was Kelly\u2019s now infamous assertions, encased in terms of a question, on Trump\u2019s past remarks toward women.<\/p>\n Not only was this topic wholly inappropriate for a debate setting; outside of the decade-old comments he made about Rosie O\u2019Donnell, the other remarks to which Kelly alludes weren\u2019t even accurate.<\/p>\n Levin describes Kelly\u2019s \u201cquestion\u201d as \u201coutrageous.\u201d Levin told Breitbart <\/em>that Fox had to comb through 185 episodes and 14 seasons of Trump\u2019s hit shows, The Apprentice <\/em>and Celebrity Apprentice, <\/em>to find a single line in which Trump allegedly told a female contestant to \u201cget on her knees,\u201d or something to this effect.<\/p>\n The line, however, was divested of its original context and made, by Kelly, into something that it was not.<\/p>\n Levin called this whole display an \u201cembarrassment.\u201d<\/p>\n Given the enormous backlash against Fox, and Megyn Kelly specifically, to say nothing of the fact that Trump\u2019s numbers, including his favorability rating, have risen considerably since these theatrics unfolded, I\u2019d have to guess that millions of Trump supporters, and a not insignificant number of those, like yours truly, that do not <\/em>support Trump, agree with Levin\u2019s assessment.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Now that the first of the GOP presidential debates is history, I offer some thoughts. First, that this event turned out to be the highest rated non-sports cable show ever is due exclusively to Donald Trump. Anyone with any doubts about this need only ask themselves: Who even remembers the first of the GOP presidential…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1358","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n