Someone Neuter George Stephanopoulos, Please

I was going to write about music today. But the two most inane and vacuous performances of the debate season came last night in Pennsylvania, persuading me otherwise. I'm writing, of course, of ABC moderators George Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson. Both were pathetic. The day after an Iraqi brigade cuts and runs, the same day a suicide bomb kills 50 people attending a funeral in Baghdad, and the same day President Bush blows more smoke about climate change, we're treated to such gems as

• a barely coherent question from Stephanopoulos about the Weather Underground, last heard from sometime around 1969;
• an invitation from Gibson for the candidates to discuss the mutterings of Mario Cuomo, a politician who hasn't been in the national spotlight for 20 years;
• wasting the time of voters, viewers, and both candidates by pushing them on trivialities that they both addressed time and again;
• two videotaped questions that insulted the voters of Pennsylvania by implying that they care most about who wears a flag lapel pin and how many times Hillary Clinton has to address her memory lapse or fantasy or whatever you want to call it about being under sniper fire in Yugoslavia. Hey, I enjoy watching a politician forced onto a rhetorical Slip-n-Slide as much as the next guy, but enough already;
• frankly unbelievable interrogations from both moderators in which they appeared to express great concern for those making $200,000+ a year. You'd think that there weren't 50,000,000 people without health insurance. And yet it's Barack Obama who is the elitist!;
  
• still more questions to Obama about Reverend Jeremiah Wright. George, Charles: HE'S TALKED ABOUT IT TIME AND AGAIN. HE GAVE A MAJOR SPEECH ON RACE RELATIONS THAT YOU APPARENTLY MISSED. EVERYONE KNOWS WHAT HE HAS TO SAY ON THE MATTER.

It took nearly an hour of Gibson acting like he was trying out for a role on Law And Order and Stephanopoulos alternating between lobbing softballs to Clinton and attempting to ambush Obama for anything remotely resembling a pertinent question to surface. A revolting, pathetic, embarrassing 90 minutes from two men who apparently did not take their charge seriously in any way. And the MSM says Obama is out of touch?

Personal Disclosure: My mother's family is from Pennsylvania. I have spent many happy days there. I know for a fact that the people there are more informed and care about matters of greater substance than the dolts at ABC led the rest of the United States to believe.

For more along these lines, read Tom Shales' review of last night's bomb here. Eric Alterman didn't think much of it, either. Katrina Vanden Heuvel gets past the outrage to critique ABC with thoughtfulness and even sadness, here. In the end, though, this gets it about right:

It's hard to imagine the MSM sinking any lower than last night. But, at least one of them will find a way to show the rest of us that the bottom of the barrel is farther down than anyone previously believed. Bet on it.