Jim Lehrer Segues from Debate Moderator to Kerry Side Boy.
Mood:  irritated
Topic: Lehrer Fixes Debates


Jim Lehrer showed a bit of pro-Kerry slip late in the debate.

After John Kerry made a portentuous pronouncement regarding "the truth" (as opposed to what the President had said earlier), Lehrer gave into the mischievious - and frankly speaking, weird - impulse to ask the President if he was "comfortable" with Kerry having said the words "the truth."

And exactly as he should have, Bush good-humoredly laughed Lehrer's probe off as the weirdness it was, rendering it harmless.

The rest of us should be asking Jim Lehrer just what the hell he was up to with that remark. It wasn't professional, it wasn't objective, and it clearly betrayed Lehrer's pro-Kerry bias near the climax of the first debate.

Maybe the President was supposed to storm offstage in a huff after Jim Lehrer showed us all that he's much more a Kerry supporter than he is any sort of a journalist. You have to wonder which President they've been watching these past four years.

The clear loser in this debate - Jim Lehrer.

What respect he had going into this thing is now on the floor in tatters.