Following the last debate I find myself again just a little bit peeved with the media. Now I don't thnk I'm the first one to have concerns in this area. I recently happened across an item on one site, MediaMatters . Other such sites could probably be found. So there do appear to be attempts to answer the eternal question

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Or

Who watches the watchers?

With the public service part of this blog completed, we return to normally scheduled programming in progress.

Here we are on Tuesday Night Live. Senator Clinton please try to pronounce the name of the new Russian leader. Because, well, we just think struggling with foreign names is kind of funny. Senator Obama I'm afraid we have some questions for you as well, but you can skip over the hard parts if you like. I mean at times that still seems about it. The media just seem to say. 'Yes, we're biased in favor of Obama, next question'. He's just about got the nomination anyhow so why worry over a fait accompli? Or more colloquially, "In the tank for Obama" might actually have come from the last SNL. I find myself thinking back toward the point in the campaign when Bill Clinton became a more active surrogate. Obama complained, contending that having a former president involved made it a two on one contest. I do not hear any complaints from him now when it seems to him plus the media versus Senator Clinton. The media has power, influence and constant presence. I don't think this should be abused and then the abuse shrugged off.

So what in particular was there in the last Democratic debate that concerned me? It wasn't anything involving "fireworks" but more a thumb on the scale. Enough to frustrate Clinton and tip things to Obama.

RUSSERT: The title of one of your books, "Audacity of Hope," you acknowledge you got from a sermon from Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the head of the Trinity United Church. He said that Louis Farrakhan "epitomizes greatness."

He said that he went to Libya in 1984 with Louis Farrakhan to visit with Moammar Gadhafi and that, when your political opponents found out about that, quote, "your Jewish support would dry up quicker than a snowball in Hell."

RUSSERT: What do you do to assure Jewish-Americans that, whether it's Farrakhan's support or the activities of Reverend Jeremiah Wright, your pastor, you are consistent with issues regarding Israel and not in any way suggesting that Farrakhan epitomizes greatness?

Eventually Obama made this statement...

OBAMA: Tim, I have to say I don't see a difference between denouncing and rejecting. There's no formal offer of help from Minister Farrakhan that would involve me rejecting it. But if the word "reject" Senator Clinton feels is stronger than the word "denounce," then I'm happy to concede the point, and I would reject and denounce.

Most seem to have seen this as being particularly deft and successful handling of the question. I would have to rate it as a complete 'duck' concerning any sort of statement either denouncing or rejecting any statements of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Some of these statements have also been rather extreme. My intent is not to comment on those myself. A little Googling could provide some background there.

Possible keywords to search on would be "Jeremiah Wright Obama tucker carlson". My point though is simply that Obama did in fact intentionally or unintenionally "duck" the more complicated personal tie to Wright on this question. So it wasn't quite so successful handling of a tough question - or even more so?

I thought there was another 'duck' on the question that Obama would talk to foreign leaders without preconditions. I may be wrong here as I'm not locating this in the Cleveland transcript. I did see where possibly it was in the prior debate, I saw this someplace else, not an exact transcript, where it may of been raised by Clinton in passing. The issue has been raised often enough that it probably still wouldn't have qualified as a tough question for Obama. But for now I may of just been mixing something up myself.

Although President Bush did just raise this in a speech today - he was agin it. So maybe this was a missed tough question opportunity for the final debate.

I was curious on the question that came up as to whether Obama said we should bomb Pakistan. He denied it and rightly. It appeared in my searching on this that actually the media itself misrepresented statements he made and my guess would be Clinton picked up the misrepresentation from there. I can't claim Obama bias here, but again the power of the press is evident. I would point out though that Obama used this opportunity to indicate this...

With respect to Pakistan, I never said I would bomb Pakistan. What I said was that if we have actionable intelligence against bin Laden or other key al Qaeda officials, and we -- and Pakistan is unwilling or unable to strike against them, we should. And just several days ago, in fact, this administration did exactly that and took out the third-ranking al Qaeda official.

Strictly as a debate argument. Isn't this trying to take some credit for a Bush administration success? Is Obama then prepared to take blame for Bush administration failures? Didn't Obama say Hillary Clinton couldn't take credit for Clinton administratation successes if she didn't take blame for all the things back then that didn't work?

There were other things that I thought seemed, shall we say, unfortunate. The commercial break where Hillary Clinton was interrupted for the pink jingly cell phone commercial. Tim Russert cutting short Clinton again for a follow-up question. As mentioned above the Russert follow-up question getting Clinton to say the funny foreign name. Her first answer it might be noted was absolutely correct.

One almost last thing. I just heard tonight the suggestion that the race card was not played by the Clintons but by the media for Obama. This was something that I considered true and was sort of getting at in a couple of my first blogs.

One last thing. Barack Obama is not muslim. Given that, the head gear in the often shown and much debated Drudge Report photograph was funny, if you find that sort of thing funny. Sorry.