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I just turned off "Meet the Press."

This was the single most extreme example of cluelessness in general and liberal media bias in particular that I have ever witnessed.

The subject was yesterday's Iowa Straw Poll, in which Michele Bachmann finished in a statistical dead heat with Ron Paul.

Yet these bozos yapped on for half an hour without mentioning Paul, except in passing. They went on at great length about Bachmann and even Tim Pawlenty, her fellow Minnesotan who finished way back in the pack and dropped out of the race. But hardly a word about the Texas congressman.

I found this particularly grating when the subject came to the theme of getting the government off our back. First they showed a clip from Rick Perry, even though the Texas governor did not compete in the straw poll.

Then they showed a clip from, of all people, Pawlenty. Not a single one of these clowns mentioned that Paul practically invented the idea of getting the government off our backs.

And not a single one of them mentioned that Paul also pioneered the idea of voting against raising the debt ceiling. He has never voted to raise it in all his years in Congress. Yet when that issue came up, all the talk was about Bachmann, who just discovered the issue the other day, relatively speaking, and who is a complete ignoramus on economic issues.

What are these idiots up to? Well, I shouldn't use terms like "idiots" and "bozos." These guys know exactly what they're doing. The pitchmen for the mainstream Republican Party, such as Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, want to do everything in their power to deep-six the man who has stood up to the Republican establishment for three decades.

As for the journalists, there was not a conservative up there on stage. All were liberals who love the idea of portraying the ditzy Bachmann as the face of the Republican Party. In the earlier part of the show before the panel session, host David Gregory spent half an hour interviewing her. He focused almost entirely on social issues such as gay marriage, the better to make the GOP look out of touch with middle-class voters.

Somewhere in there one of the panelists made an observation that the attendees at the Ames poll are heavily evangelical in their beliefs. Well if that's the case, then Paul won the day. Even though his message is not tailored to evangelicals, he got the votes of 4,671 of those in attendance. Meanwhile Bachmann, whose appeal is focused on evangelicals, got just 152 more votes than Paul.

And then there's the fact that Paul has defined the issues in this race. On Obamacare, he was the first to come out against the individual mandate, for example, which he did as early as 2007 in this column of mine. He has always been a deficit hawk, another area in which the rest of the field is following his lead. And he's refocused the foreign policy debate to the question of whether the U.S. should be the world's policeman, and he won on that issue it in the debate Thursday night.

I'm sure if I discussed all this with the talking heads who were on the panel, I'd hear what I always hear from liberal commentators: Ron Paul is "unelectable."

Perhaps you believe that. If you do, you're either a Democratic operative or a moron.

Check

from Real Clear politics. Of all the candidates in the field, Ron Paul lines up best against President Obama with the single exception of Mitt Romney. And Romney's going to have a tough time getting through the primaries if this straw poll is any indication.

The reason is not far to seek. Alone among the Republicans, Paul connects with the youth vote. Though he the oldest candidate in the field, he has the youngest supporters, all of whom are aware just how wretched an economy they're going to be inheriting.

The economy is going to be the big issue next year, yet the members of the panel ignored it. If they'd paid attention to it, they would have had to discuss Paul, the sole candidate who predicted the collapse of 2008.

It's far more fun for a liberal to focus on Bachmann and her Bible-based ideas on social issues - all of which are calculated to alienate the same youth voters to whom Paul appeals.

A further bonus for liberals is that Bachmann is guaranteed to keep saying really stupid things, such as her assertion that Barack Obama ran up more debt in his first year than all prior presidents combined. Paul, by contrast, cannot be caught in such a howler because he knows the budget much better than any of the questioners do.

He certainly knows more about it than David Gregory. I suspect another reason these blow-dried bozos don't like to have Paul on their shows is that they'd have to do some actual research to ask intelligent questions on such topics as the role of the Federal Reserve.

With Bachmann, it's a simple matter of asking over and over if she really means what she says about the Bible. This is great fun - if you're a simpleton or a party hack. And all the people on that panel met one of those definitions.