ABC showed its journalistic bias this evening stacking the deck against Barack Obama v Hillary Clinton 4 to 1 in personal attacks.

Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos opened the debate with salvos of attacks on Obama’s statement about the working class being bitter over economic conditions and thus clinging to guns and or religion, hit him on his pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright for his anti-American invective, attacked him for not wearing an American Flag pin on his lapel and fired off questions about his relationship with William Ayres who once admitted to bombing the pentagon, a member of the legal defense team of the Black Panthers and serving on a Board with him.

Meanwhile Hillary Clinton was hit with having misspoken claiming that she landed in Bosnia under sniper fire. Yet not one question was fired at Hillary about her relationships, in particular fund raisers associated with Clinton from the Chinese community.

On each of these personal attacks, some of which were actions of the candidate or actions taken by an associate of the candidate, both Obama and Clinton had an opportunity to respond. But the ABC attacks on Obama blatantly favored Clinton.

Following the last attack on Obama dealing with Ayres, the one journalist Gibson, and the political operative Stephanopoulos, moved on to the traditional issues of the campaign, the Iraq war, the economy, healthcare, the sub prime rate and finally, because as Gibson said it was the anniversary of the Virginia Tech disaster when students were gunned down, he raised gun control.

From a journalistic perspective, the debate was a disaster and ABC and Gibson and Stephanopoulos should be ashamed of themselves for such a one-sided and bias set up at the outset of the debate. They virtually came close to serving up puff ball questions to Clinton while stacking the deck against Obama.

It appeared to this viewer that the Clinton machine got to ABC, or this was a pre-set agenda by ABC management.

And this viewpoint comes from a conservative republican — neither Obama nor Clinton will get my vote.

But from a journalistic perspective I thought the debate demonstrated crass bias.