Nailed it. The terrible thing about an MSM that doesn’t care about facts is that victory goes to the boldest liar. Not good for the Republic.

Are we seeing that now? We may have seen it in New Hampshire. But frankly, that election was not expected to be close; it’s amazing that Scott Brown got as close as he did. So I don’t suspect fraud in that case, not really. And we just heard that a very close election in Alaska has gone to the Republican candidate.

Nor have we heard, as we did in 2012, of massive voter intimidation at the polls, nor of districts where 100% of votes went to a particular candidate. It’s possible that it happened, although I do think we’d have heard about it by now.

All this means to me, however, is that those intent on perpetrating voter fraud — no parties named here! — were not terribly motivated in the 2014 mid-term election. I strongly suspect that this will NOT be the case in 2016.

So let’s deal with voter fraud preemptively… BEFORE 2016.

(Too bad most of us will probably not get to use our insights in conversations, since those with whom we agree don’t need it and those with whom we disagree won’t hear it.)

We don’t know that, concerning the 2014 election. We really don’t know how deep and tall and wide and profound and punishing to the bad guys the 2014 results may actually have been, had there actually taken place a genuinely clean election.

Anyone out there care to speculate?

I believe Tina Fey still brags about taking down Sarah Palin. The various news networks hide information that might be embarrassing to the President, while embarrassing Republicans at every opportunity… and they do it because they want to, not because they were told to!

Let’s count ourselves lucky that the Democrats were asleep at the switch in 2014. You can bet they won’t be in 2016. And a great many unpaid Democrat activists will do anything they can do influence the election. (Fortunately, we are starting to see a backlash — see Neo’s post about the man who researched Jonathan Gruber in his spare time.)

And let’s hope that, among the many legislative measures Republicans push over the next two years, that electoral transparency is among them. We may not have had much of a problem with voter fraud in 2014, but we can certainly expect it in 2016.

Sham on Candy Crowley. Shame on any news agency that didn’t fire her on the spot. Shame on any party that would let its leader behave in such a manner.

Nice work. Well done.

Many here are stipulating a collaboration, overt or otherwise, between the President and Crowley. (We will not have anything other than suspicions unless either Obama or Crowley come forward with evidence. However, using Occam’s Razor, it really is difficult to believe that there was NOT collusion here.)

So stipulate collusion. The connotations are mind-boggling.

The President said “Get the transcript”… and Crowley jumped right to it, as though it was an order she was expecting. (Had she not, her reaction would have been “Are you talking to me, Mr. President?” or perhaps “Which transcript?”)

What’s even more mind-boggling for me is that the President could not have known, in advance, that he’d be called on this particular issue. So Crowley must have been prepped to back up the President, perhaps on more than one issue, at his request.

The sheer brazen dishonesty of the President — for he must have been in on it, to make the call the way he did — and of Crowley, to go along with it — is breath-taking.

Concerning your basic thesis, Neo, I agree that Romney was bluffed to perfection. And it’s quite possible that no one, in his shoes, could have done any better than he did. That doesn’t stop me from wishing he’d risen to the challenge. It’s just too bad, that’s all.

And it’s also too bad that it took something like this to discover what President Obama is actually good at. It’s the only virtuoso performance by him, at anything, that I can recall.

I had a vague memory that before the debate she made some comments to the effect that she’d be inserting herself rather forcefully into the debate, unlike earlier moderators, and I just found this:

In a rare example of political unity, both the Romney and Obama campaigns have expressed concern to the Commission on Presidential Debates about how the moderator of this Tuesday’s town hall has publicly described her role, TIME has learned.

While an early-October memorandum of understanding between the Obama and Romney campaigns suggests that CNN’s Candy Crowley would play a limited role in the Tuesday-night session, Crowley, who is not a party to that agreement, has done a series of interviews on her network in which she has suggested that she will assume a broader set of responsibilities. As Crowley put it last week, “Once the table is kind of set by the town-hall questioner, there is then time for me to say, ‘Hey, wait a second, what about X, Y, Z?’”

So she saw her role as “pro-active” from the get-go.

Add to that the pressure she must have been feeling to come to Obama’s aid because of his extremely poor performance in the first debate.

Interesting. When I get a moment I’ll take a look at those interviews, although I may have read them 2 years ago, when it all happened. But just the fact that Crowley stood by her assertion that Obama called the Benghazi attack terrorism in the Rose Garden speech reveals her bias, because he definitely did not. But that doesn’t deal with the remarkable fact that she decided to fact-check Romney in real time, without a transcript, and wave those papers, going way beyond the role of a moderator in a presidential debate. Even had she been correct in her facts, that was an outrageous act on the face of it.