There's no doubt that CNN's Candy Crowley did Barack Obama a huge favor by supporting his false "act of terror" narrative during the second presidential debate. Imagine if Obama had been forced to concede the truth right on that stage, in front of 65 million viewers. It would have crushed him; the election would be essentially over. The ripple effect through his dejected supporters and media boosters would have been devastating. And it's not hard to see that Mitt Romney was a bit stunned by the moderator's eager willingness to back up Obama's lies. It threw him off his game, and gave the press fuel to describe the encounter as a draw, or even narrow Obama victory.
Whatever hope Barack Obama retains of a second term was indisputably saved that night, at the cost of Candy Crowley's reputation. (Don't worry about her - she'll be richly rewarded by grateful liberals for saving Obama's bacon, even though by her own account, she is objectively unqualified to serve as any sort of "journalist.") But there's a good reason Mitt Romney was so insistent on nailing Obama down over whether he thought the Benghazi attack was a terrorist assault at the time he gave his Rose Garden speech. The last debate is on foreign policy, and Candy Crowley won't be there to save Barack Obama this time.
American Crossroads has produced a short, devastating video timeline of the Obama Administration's lies about this "act of terror." It's unfair to throw Hillary Clinton in there - she did mention That Damned Video during the speech in question, and the way she discussed it might have been inappropriate, but she wasn't implying that it was the cause of the Benghazi attack. However, the worst debate moderator in history makes an entirely appropriate appearance in the big finale.
Update: With a hat tip to the Weekly Standard, here's "Black Hawk Down" author Mark Bowden, who has a new book about the killing of Osama bin Laden, saying what every critic of Obama's Benghazi cover-up suspects: "I think that they probably do - or did, shy away from presenting this as an Al Qaeda attack just because of perceptions of, you know, that organization still being alive, still being a threat. And so I don't know for a fact, but it makes sense to me."
