All over the western world, the mainstream media are infested with illiberals: the humourless, conscienceless, Islam-loving Politically Correct Fascists of the Left who crawl out from under their rocks each day for no other purpose than to police the thoughts of those few who remain capable of thought and close them down.
So desensitised to this infestation are most of the sheeple that it's very hard to persuade them of the reality of it, much less motivate them to do anything about it. Yesterday, CNBC did all civilised human beings, and the sheeple, a favour by making it unambiguous. In the third Republican presidential debate, John Harwood, Becky Quick and Carl Quintanilla behaved with an unprofessionalism this former current affairs interviewer has never seen before in his life, even from the illiberals who dominate the New Zealand media. Ostensibly they were there as disinterested non-partisan moderators, not advocacy journalists. Yet they did not question; they asserted. They did not leave their own views outside the studio door; they wore them on their deformed tongues and tried to vomit them all over the candidates and the camera lenses. They did not seek to elicit enlightenment on behalf of Republican primary voters trying to decide whom among the eleven to vote for; they sought to interpose their own PC theology and make the proceedings all about them (I lost count of how many times the grotesque and rather slow Ms Quick used the first person singular). They did not pursue explication on matters of substance; they launched gratuitous ad hominem attacks.
All of this, while lamentable, was most edifying. The candidates quickly wised up as to what was going on and closed ranks. Ted Cruz then identified it:
The questions that have been asked so far in this debate illustrate why the American people don't trust the media. This is not a cage match. And, you look at the questions--'Donald Trump, are you a comic-book villain?''Ben Carson, can you do math?''John Kasich, will you insult two people over here?''Marco Rubio, why don't you resign?''Jeb Bush, why have your numbers fallen?' How about talking about the substantive issues the people care about?"
He contrasted this behaviour with that of the fawning sycophants who hosted the love-fest with the Democrats on CNN a couple of weeks earlier, in a debate he described as an encounter between "the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks."
Marco Rubio got in an even better line when he called the mainstream media "Hillary's Super PAC" who had been prodigiously proclaiming the week in which Clinton was shown incontrovertibly to have lied about Benghazi to be her best campaign week thus far.
Never was mainstream media maggotry more manifest.
Deliciously, on this occasion it has spawned the overdue rise of Ted Cruz, arguably the best of a field that is the most libertarian since Reagan (for all that even the avowedly libertarian Rand Paul is not running as one). The illiberal media maggotry was imprudent enough to expose its underbelly, affording every viewer on the planet an "actual size" view of the infestation's reality and hideousness. The planet will be the better for that.