From WSJ’s John Fund, e-mailed to Reynolds:

Last week, CNN’s Anderson Cooper quipped in an interview with Townhall.com that “campaign operatives are people too” and that CNN wasn’t worried if political partisans posed questions at the upcoming GOP debate he was moderating. “We don’t investigate the background of people asking questions (by submitting video clips). It’s not our job,” is how he put it.

But now CNN’s logo has egg splattered all over it, as it scrambles to explain how a co-chair of Hillary Clinton’s veterans’ committee was allowed to ask a video question on gays in the military at Wednesday’s debate and was also flown by the network from California to the debate site in Florida so he could repeat his question to the candidates in person. CNN claims it verified retired Brig. Gen. Ketih Kerr’s military status and checked his campaign contribution records, contradicting Mr. Cooper’s blasé attitudes. Still, they somehow missed his obvious connection to the Hillary campaign which any Google search would have turned up. CNN later airbrushed Mr. Kerr’s question out of its rebroadcast of the debate, indicating that it apparently doesn’t think “campaign operatives” are legitimate questioners at the network’s debates.

It seems more “plants” are being uprooted with each passing day. Almost a third of the questioners seem to have some ties to Democratic causes or candidates. Another questioner worked with Democratic Senator Dick Durbin’s staff. A former intern with Democratic Rep. Jane Harman asked a question about farm subsidies. A questioner who purported to be a Ron Paul supporter turns out to be a Bill Richardson volunteer. David McMillan, a TV writer from Los Angeles, turns out to have several paens to John Edwards on his YouTube page and has attended Barack Obama fundraisers.

Given CNN’s professed goal to have “ordinary Americans” ask questions at their GOP debate, how likely is that it was purely by accident that so many of the videos CNN selected for use were not just from partisans, but people actively hostile to the GOP’s messages and candidates?

Glenn adds: “It makes it kind of hard to trust CNN.” No, it makes it impossible to trust the Clinton News Network — unless you’re a partisan yourself, or vehemently stupid, or both. They’re liars, they’re biased, and the only actual journalism they’re capable of producing is wholly accidental. Expecting any worthwhile journalism from them is like expecting a pregnant pup to have kittens; it’s patently unpossible. Their level of credibility with any honest observer is now, and ought to be, precisely that of the New York Times: they have none whatever. A commenter from Howie Kurtz’s WaPo blog says:

So let me get this straight… in the Democrat YouTube debates, the “undecided questioners” are Democratic activists and in the Republican YouTube debates, the “undecided questioners” are Democratic activists.

Well, at least they’re consistent.

They are that. Consistently dishonest, consistently unreliable, consistently false. They deserve every last ounce of scorn currently being heaped on their DNC-owned heads.

Update! And speaking of the NYT…

Updated update! Fairly unbalanced: Clinton News Network sought questions from Demo-rat Underground. Outrageous, and so brazen as to be very nearly unbelievable. These ultraliberal cretins and their clearly unmanageable bias are undermining the First Amendment with every step they take in pursuing their not-so-cleverly-hidden agenda. They ought to be stopped; the Repubs ought to think long and hard before agreeing to another CNN-hosted debate. Let the Clinton News Network host all the Democrat circle-jerks they want; Repubs have no reason whatsoever to give them even a moment’s worth of their time.