It's got to be incredibly frustrating for Republican voters to see that PBS, the taxpayer-funded television network, is so completely incapable of finding a balanced panel of analysts after a presidential debate. After the third debate, Jim Lehrer lined up this anti-McCain crew:
-- David Brooks, the increasingly fraudulent "conservative," who effusively praised Obama for being grand and calm "like a redwood forest," a "source of comfort," while McCain "seemed tight" and "hard to live with for four years," and who ended up the night announcing McCain would lose. (UPDATE: On Charlie Rose later, Brooks decided Obama was so cool he was "a mountain.")
-- Mark Shields, the liberal former Bobby Kennedy campaign aide, who obviously agreed about Obama's "eerie coolness."
-- Historian Michael Beschloss, a liberal who's written books with Clinton Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, who trashed McCain for saying anything about Bill Ayers, which caused Lehrer to at least suggest that Bob Schieffer raised the subject.
-- Clarence Page, a liberal columnist for Obama's hometown Chicago Tribune, who's compared the GOP to the KKK, saying Obama was wise not to slam Sarah Palin since she's destroying herself.
-- Amy Walter, a former campaign manager for liberal Democrat Congresswoman Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky, who said Sarah Palin has ruined her bump and is now "a real non-factor."
There was a brief interview with NPR's Scott Horsley and Don Gonyea about how the candidates they cover (McCain and Obama, respectively) did by their own measurements. Gonyea stresses that Obama gave "pretty clean, direct answers" on Ayers and ACORN, while Horsley at least took exception to Obama's claim that Ayers was a "centerpiece" of the McCain campaign. Horsley said it's not a major part of the stump speech -- because McCain's people know "it's not working."
David Brooks tried to be generous at the end and say the "landscape has been so biased against McCain." He meant the tide of events, and of course, as he mentioned, the tidal wave of Obama Cool. But it's quite clear that one uphill battle McCain continues to face is a completely biased taxpayer-funded network.