"No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation." -- Barack Obama

As of this writing there have been three pre-election debates, two presidential and one vice-presidential. In each of these, Republican candidates Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan went in knowing they started at a disadvantage. In every case, they faced up to that disadvantage and acquitted themselves well. In each case, the debate was moderated by a liberal -- not conservative, not even centrist, but liberal -- reporter with a political agenda to get Barack Obama reelected President of the United States.

Liberal bias in the news media for generations has been a fact of life with which Republicans, particularly conservatives, have had to contend. Such bias is well documented by organizations such as the Media Research Center, as well as by such publications as the book, Bias, by former CBS News reporter Bernard Goldberg. It all tends to raise a question: If Republicans have any say at all in the decisions of the Elections Commission, why then, do they agree to a situation in which the proverbial deck is stacked against them? It is to their credit that Romney and Ryan so far have prevailed in their respective debates.

In the first debate, candidate Romney scored a clear, irrefutable win over the president. The reason was obvious. Romney came to the debate prepped and ready. Obama did not. Either the president underestimated his opponent or overestimated himself (or perhaps he really believes, as is strongly suggested by fawning sycophants in the "mainstream" media, that he is one to be likened to the Almighty). At any rate, Obama's lack of preparation quickly erased any initial advantage he might have had in having liberal Jim Lehrer as moderator for the debate.

This situation may not have been entirely Obama's fault, however. Since his 2008 campaign against John McCain, which even McCain's supporters were forced to concede had been a lightweight affair, Obama had not faced a serious challenge in debate. His speeches, aided considerably by the use of teleprompters, were generally delivered to selected audiences sympathetic to his radical viewpoint. Interviews were granted only to those firmly in the Obama camp, and the questions he was used to answering came from adoring admirers in the "mainstream" news media, and they were always softballs. Is it any wonder, then, that when a serious challenge from a prepared and ready opponent finally came, the president had no idea of how to handle it?

The second debate was similar, though not exactly the same. In this debate, Republican vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan faced the team of Vice President Joe Biden and his media ally, Martha Raddatz. As the initial advantage for Obama had been erased by Obama's own lack of preparation, so that for Biden was erase by the Vice President's own boorish behavior during the debate. Biden came across more as a class clown than Vice President of the United States, and Ryan emerged as the clear winner.

Then came the second presidential debate, the third debate in toto. This time Obama was thoroughly coached and prepared to do battle with Romney, and he came out swinging. He also showed his audience who he really is, not so much politically as rather what kind of politician he is. When the facts are in a politician's favor, he simply lays them out, as did Romney and Ryan. When the facts are against him, he lies -- and Obama lied with virtually every breath he took. He lied about the economy, he lied about oil and energy production, and he lied about unemployment. His most egregious lie, however, was about the 9-11 anniversary terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, particularly with regard to his own role in it, in which he claimed to have announced to the nation from the Rose Garden that it had, in fact, been a terrorist attack.

Romney was quick to call him on this lie, correctly stating that 14 days had elapsed before this admission was finally made, following repeated claims by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, U.N. ambassador Susan Rice, and Obama himself, that the violence had been a spontaneous riot in reaction to an anti-Islamic video. Obama, who had clearly been ready for this objection, curtly said, "Check the transcript." It was when Romney attempted to continue that moderator Candy Crowley injected herself into the fray, saying that she had a copy of the transcript, and that it did say, as Obama had claimed, that the affair had been a terrorist attack. What was actually said appears in the quote above. When a reality check on this was made by Fox News, determining that the phrase "acts of terror" had not specifically meant the Benghazi attack, Crowley later backtracked on her previous statement.

The bias in all this, however, was irrefutable. For one, moderator Crowley clearly had no business injecting herself into the debate at all. But she did. Moreover, she knowingly aided and abetted President Obama in lying to his audience. In addition, during the debate she interrupted Romney a total of 28 times, as opposed to nine interruptions of Obama. In all three debates, lifelines were routinely thrown by the moderators to the Democratic candidates. Yet despite all of this, in each case the facts had been on the side of the Republicans. The Democrats, devoid of any genuine rebuttal, were reduced to spin, oratory -- and lies.

Liberal media bias was amply demonstrated in all three debates. It was in the third debate, however, that the viewers and listeners saw for themselves those things that Obama and his fellow Democrats never intended to be seen: first of all, that their president is a brazen, shameless, unequivocal liar, and second, that today's news media (Fox News excepted) is made up almost entirely of biased, partisan, left-wing agenda-driven ideologues who will stop at nothing and use any means to get their chosen candidates elected. Such people have absolutely no business moderating presidential or vice-presidential debates. In any other business, this would be called conflict of interest. Why it continually gets a pass in the field of journalism is something at which fair-minded observers can only guess.

Tim Siggia

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Tim Siggia from Hartford Connecticut, attended Central Connecticut State College (now Central Connecticut State University) from 1963-67 and then joined the United States Navy. In 1973 he completed a bachelor or arts degree in English at the University of Maine at Portland-Gorham. In 1991 he retired from the Navy at the grade of Chief Journalist after which he joined the United States Postal Service, from which he is due to retire in 2012. He now lives in East Hartford Connecticut with his wife Penny. They have three sons and six grandchildren