[guest post by JVW]

In the aftermath of last night’s lamentable debate, the sophisticated Eastern Corridor media has assumed their sacred role of fact-checkers, assuring us that while the Dem candidate sometimes shades the truth or jumbles her facts, the GOP candidate is an inveterate liar who invents facts wholesale. Comes now [I stole that from the late William Safire, I think] one Brooke Baldwin of CNN, who last came to our attention when she declared that the Baltimore riots were fueled by returning veterans (presumably working as cops) who have a hankering for shooting up communities in which they have no emotional investment. Earlier this week (in fact, before the debate), Ms. Baldwin put her ignorance of the legislative branch of our government on full display, in a vain effort to criticize the GOP nominee:

So Ms. Baldwin is under the impression that members of Congress are already subject to term limits, which in her eyes makes the GOP nominee’s call for a Constitutional Amendment superfluous and dumb. Note her snide exclamation, “Correct me — there already are term limits for members of Congress, so what does he mean?” Watch her roll her eyes as she forthrightly exposes the ignorance of the GOP nominee who doesn’t know the first thing about civics and actually seems to believe that some elected politicians spend decades mucking about Capitol Hill. How difficult it must be for Brooke Baldwin to suffer these fools who are nominated for the Presidency!

Once Ms. Baldwin makes her declaration that Congress is already subject to term limits, check out the two men staring dumbly into the camera with their vapid TV grins affixed to their mugs. It’s up to CNN political analyst Dana Bash who seems to give a slight “oh shit: I can’t believe she said that” head-bob before gingerly trying to set her colleague straight:

“Right. Well, there’s term limits on the Presidency of course, and one of the big debates for some time has been whether or not the fact that there are no term limits in Congress — whether that helps to breed corruption because it breeds a whole industry of lobbyists. . . .”

If you watch Ms. Baldwin during this exchange you can sort of detect the moment when it dawns upon her that she is completely wrong. She manages to maintain her poker face throughout the Ms. Bash’s response, but at one point she departs from staring into the camera in order to look down at her notes. Wouldn’t you love to know what a producer might have been saying into her earpiece during those moments? The video ends at that point and I don’t care about this to track down how the rest of the segment played out. Ms. Baldwin, to my knowledge, has not publicly addressed the issue, but she is being lit up on Twitter. Behold a sampling of some tweets she has received in response to a tweet of hers in which she discusses bumping into GOP campaign manager Steve Bannon on a recent flight:

Here’s a huge surprise: outside of the usual suspects in right-wing media, no traditional outlets seem to care that a CNN political host is so substantively wrong on what is a pretty well-known fact. I agree with Patterico and Dana that this election is probably lost, and now we’re going to have to deal with an insufferable media that believes that it has performed some special service to the republic by putting their thumbs on the scale of the election coverage. I’m afraid that things just get worse from here on in.

– JVW