Brokaw's first question to Obama will be "When did you stop beating your wife?"

Now that John McCain has decided that simply reporting on a question asked by a voter, in public, is "gotcha journalism", it's hardly surprising that Camp Grandpa would throw tantrums about anything whatsoever that didn't cast its candidate as a comic book, larger-than-life action hero instead of a an old man who clearly has lost some of his faculties and has decided that a theocratic nitwit should be next in line if something should happen to him.

But that a television network, which broadcasts over what's supposed to be the public airwaves, has a special envoy to Camp Grandpa, whose job is to silence the whining and the kvetching by bowing and scraping, is beyond the pale. But that is exactly what NBC is doing, in the person of Tom Brokaw:

In an interview here after Sunday’s broadcast, Mr. Brokaw said that over the summer he had “advocated” within the executive suite of NBC News to modify the anchor duties of the MSNBC hosts Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews on election night and on nights when there were presidential debates. Their expressions of strong political opinions from the MSNBC anchor desk has run counter to the more traditional role Mr. Brokaw played on “NBC Nightly News” for more than two decades. NBC said earlier this month that the two hosts would mostly relinquish their anchor duties to Mr. Gregory, while being present as analysts.

“Keith is an articulate guy who writes well and doesn’t make his arguments in a ‘So’s your old mother’ kind of way,” Mr. Brokaw said. “The mistake was to think he could fill both roles. The other mistake was to think he wouldn’t be tempted to use the anchor position to engage in commentary. That’s who he is.”

Mr. Brokaw said he had also conducted some shuttle diplomacy in recent weeks between NBC and the McCain campaign. His mission, he said, was to assure the candidate’s aides that — despite some negative on-air commentary by Mr. Olbermann in particular — Mr. McCain could still get a fair shake from NBC News. Mr. Brokaw said he had been told by a senior McCain aide, whom he did not name, that the campaign had been reluctant to accept an NBC representative as one of the moderators of the three presidential debates — until his name was invoked.

“One of the things I was told by this person was that they were so irritated, they said, ‘If it’s an NBC moderator, for any of these debates, we won’t go,’ ” Mr. Brokaw said. “My name came up, and they said, ‘Oh, hell, we have to do it, because it’s going to be Brokaw.’ ”

Mr. Brokaw will moderate the second debate, on Oct. 7, in Nashville.

When you look at what the McCain campaign regards as "a fair shake" -- fawning, unquestioning coverage of John McCain's claim that he puts "country first" and his relentless lies about his positions when there is videotape to show that his claims are preposterous, one wonders how Brokaw is going to be able to satisfy this bunch of, well, whiners, without asking questions like "Senator McCain, are you a hero, a real hero, or the most heroic man ever to walk the face of the earth?"