How badly do right-wing bloggers want to live in a hermetically sealed bubble where they and their favorite political leaders never have to leave the cozy environment? So badly that in the wake of CNN's GOP presidential debate this week, bloggers were furious with the format and announced the gotcha questions posed to the candidates were a waste of time, and worse, designed to make Republicans look bad.

Hot Air blogger Ed Morrissey was fuming [emphasis added]:

We learned nothing about the deficit, except what the candidates could shoehorn into answers to inane questions. We learned very little about economic or foreign policy. We covered a lot of nonsense between the first question on jobs and the last question on running mates, but hardly anything that touched on actual voter priorities.

Bias CNN! It stacked the debate with “nonsense” questions and with topics voters don't even care about.

Worse, CNN purposely slanted the questions to help Obama. That, according to one angry Andrew Breitbart blogger who warned of “undeclared political enemies” lurking in the press corps:

What the network did last night was to all but ignore areas in which President Obama is vulnerable (deficit, gas prices, economy, Israel) and instead intensely focused on the social wedge issues that create the kind of soundbites only helpful to the Left.

Right, except that Morrissey and the Breitbart blogger forgot to mention that nearly one-third of the debate questions weren't asked by sneaky liberal journalists. They were asked by New Hampshire voters, many of whom identified themselves as Republicans. And yes, it was New Hampshire voters (not CNN anchors) who asked about the economy, immigration, health care reform, job creation, Medicare, the separation of church and state, Afghanistan, and military spending. In other words, actual voter priorities.

But apparently, citizens asking presidential candidates questions about the topics of the day is no longer considered permissible. Instead, GOP candidates, argues one blogger, should sit for questions only in forums hosted by friendly sources such as Rush Limbaugh, Jonah Goldberg, or Hugh Hewitt.

Question: When did conservatives become such a timid, fearful bunch?