Fox News Dominates First Debate

I have an honest albeit possibly naïve question: Why did Fox News field Megyn Kelly as a co-moderator for last night’s first Republican Primary debate?

Fox would have never used Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity as debate moderators; they are commentators and would not be accepted by the public as unbiased moderators.

So what makes Kelly any different? Her primetime program on Fox is all commentary. The answer of course is that Roger Ailes likes leggy blondes ratings. It seems to me that the logical choice would have been Ed Henry.

But the fact is that all of the Fox anchors dominated last night’s program, and from the beginning their treatment of Trump was adversarial.

What was with Kelly’s “misogynist” sucker punch?

Trump once called Rosie O’Donnell a “degenerate” and a “fat pig.” Hello? Those are not misogynistic statements; they are public service announcements.

And they were only made after O’Donnell lambasted Trump for his physical appearance and inherited wealth, before going off on one of his Miss USA winners who had a drug and alcohol problem. The latter seemed pretty misogynistic to me in itself. What, it’s not off limits for obnoxiously bawdy lesbians to be personally insulting and misogynistic?

Trump was right to point out the media’s obsession with PC speech. Perhaps his remarks about O’Donnell and others have been over the line, but drawing attention to them right out of the box, was a ploy by Kelly to undermine his credibility with viewers.

And for that Donald Trump needed no help. Anyone who can spell Apprentice knew Trump was likely to self-implode, sooner or later. We’ll soon see if last night was his Waterloo.

But the RNC should wise up to the media’s self-serving interest in the debate process. If they can do it to Trump, they can and will, as we already know, do it to Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio or Scott Walker, or any the establishment GOP’s designated fair-haired boys.