-By Warner Todd Huston
Early in April, CNN reported that it was thinking of resurrecting Crossfire, the left-right political debate show it canceled in 2005. Now, as the network tries to regain its faded status as a cable leader, the network is reportedly wooing Democrat strategist Stephanie Cutter and longtime conservative bon vivant Newt Gingrich to helm a re-launch of the show.
Crossfire debuted on CNN in 1982 and was originally hosted by Tom Braden and Pat Buchanan the duo who first invented the premise as a talk radio show. As the years passed a series of hosts came and went until the series ended in failing ratings amid criticism of its often times shrill rhetoric.
Sources now tell Politico that Cutter and Gingrich are both in negotiations to host the re-launch. Neither personality returned calls to confirm their status.
Gingrich, former Speaker of the House of Representatives and past candidate for the 2012 GOP nomination for President, is well known. Stephanie Cutter, however, is notorious for her work as Obama’s former deputy campaign manager.
Stephanie Cutter made a name for herself as a major spinmeister for team Obama and was a vocal and enthusiastic part of one of the dirtiest presidential campaigns in recent history.
Cutter is most well known for having been caught lying about the low-blow TV ad that claimed Mitt Romney was responsible for the death of the wife of a steel worker who once worked for a company that Romney’s Bain Capital owned.
The pressure on Cutter grew hot and heavy after the calumny perpetrated by Joe Soptic, the worker that illicitly blamed Romney for the death of the man’s wife. It got so bad, in fact, that Cutter ended up canceling TV appearances and went into hiding for a short period of time.
Later, even after the ad that said Romney killed a Bain employee’s wife, Cutter outrageously claimed that the Obama campaign never said that Bain Capital was bad.
Cutter’s performance as a fact-free attack dog was so pervasive during the 2012 campaign that even NBC’s Matt Lauer found he couldn’t let her attacks go unquestioned. During one interview, Lauer deflated Cutter’s attacks with words from Barack Obama, her own boss, as she tried to smear GOP VP candidate Paul Ryan.
In another episode, readers may recall the outright lie floated by Senate Democrat Majority Leader Harry Reid who said that he had “special inside information” that Mitt Romney had paid no income taxes for perhaps as long as 15 years. For her part, Cutter jumped to her Twitter account to join Reid’s baseless attack.
Also, the Obama campaign, with flack Cutter in the lead, continued to use the false claim that Romney planned to hand a $5 trillion tax cut to “the rich” and raise taxes on the middle class. But eventually Cutter had to admit that the Obama campaign wasn’t telling the truth about the claim.
Cutter was also a loud voice coming to Vice President Joe Biden’s aide over his outrageous claim that Republicans wanted to put black people back in chains.
As the campaign started into its final stretch, Cutter herself ended up admitting that all she did for a living was “spin” things for team Obama.
If CNN just wants “spin,” apparently Stephanie Cutter would be an ideal host for the new Crossfire. Of course, Stephanie Cutter would be a horrible mistake. She has no integrity, will obviously say any lie to push her ideology, and nothing she says could be believed.
If Cutter is the direction that CNN is going, it is clear that they won’t be interested in integrity from the left with its new edition of Crossfire.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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