This damn talk box keeps cutting off my post. With apologies, here it is below:

There's been a lot of press about George Stephanopoulos 's defense of Wednesday night's debate. He has dubiously claimed that the questions were fair and foremost in the minds of voters. But the former key member of President Clinton's team was less than partial in his questioning.

Note how he introduced the issue of William Ayers:

"A gentleman named William Ayers, he was part of the Weather Underground in the 1970s. They bombed the Pentagon, the Capitol and other buildings. He's never apologized for that. And in fact, on 9/11 he was quoted in The New York Times saying, "I don't regret setting bombs; I feel we didn't do enough.""

The statement explicitly links Ayers to 9/11, making his comments about the Weather Underground seem callous and insensitive. And yet, as the Times has noted, Ayers made those comments well before the terrorist attacks.

The fact that the comments appeared in the Times on 9/11 is inconsequential; that simply is when the paper chose to print its story on Ayer's fictional memoir.

From years as a journalist and, before that, a key player in the White House, Stephanopoulos knows how newspapers work. He knows that there are no meaningful links between 9/11 and Ayers' comments about the Weather Underground.

And yet, Stephanopoulos included that inflammatory information to get a lot of 9/11 rage stirred up again. The comment turns William Ayers into another Obama associate who was crassly insensitive about the 9/11 terror attacks, a neat counterpart to Rev. Wright and his roosting chickens.

The question was a perfect set-up for Senator Clinton who was primed to claim that New Yorkers were deeply offended by this author profile on the most tragic and disorienting day in the city's history. (Who got that deep into the Times on 9/11? Everyone I knew was watching the TV.) She seemed almost too ready to claim a healthy portion of victimization for herself.

By including the 9/11 detail, Stephanopoulos showed his true cards. He's interested in creating specious controversies. He can defend himself until he's blue in the face, but this comment was clearly meant to damage Obama's candidacy.