So George Stephanopoulos stepped in it. He donated $50,000 — or, sorry, that’s $75,000! — to the Clinton Foundation and didn’t disclose this in his coverage of the recent controversies swirling around the family charity. As with Hillary Clinton’s scandals surrounding donations to the Foundation and her use of private email, or Jeb’s Bush’s agonizing four-day process of answering a simple question about Iraq, Stephanopoulos’s error is the latest example of a veteran figure somehow being unable to anticipate the obvious.

Stephanopoulos has apologized for not disclosing these donations and recused himself from moderating any GOP presidential primary debates. It’s not entirely clear why this should have been the factor that led Stephanopoulos to that decision. It is a well known fact that Stephanopoulos served in the Clinton administration, and that he chit-chats with fellow Clinton veterans Rahm Emanuel, Paul Begala and James Carville on the phone almost every day. And while non-disclosure is a problem, it’s fascinating that donations to the Clinton Foundation are now considered controversial in and of themselves. Most rich people, Republican or Democrat, have made charitable donations to the Clinton Foundation, and not all of these donations qualify as de facto campaign contributions.

But anyway, they got rid of George Stephanopoulos. A nice, clean hit. There’s one “librul media reporter,” — in conservative parlance, this means any member of the mainstream media — who won’t get to sabotage the Republican party ahead of the 2016 election.

Is that really a good thing for the individual debaters themselves?

The mainstream media moderator serves a useful function in Republican presidential debates for the candidates. It offers them a pivot point, or a means of getting out of a corner. If a mainstream media moderator asks a difficult or uncomfortable question, the Republican candidate can simply badger the moderator for pursuing a stealth liberal agenda. Whenever the candidate is on the verge of embarrassing him or herself, he or she can lash out at the moderator for trying to embarrass the cause of conservatism as a whole. All of the Republican voters in the audience are conditioned to hoot and holler with approval whenever this happens.

It’s not enough to say that Newt Gingrich wielded this tactic from time to time during his 2012 presidential campaign. It’s more that he made yelling at mainstream media figures the centerpiece of his campaign. If you find yourself constantly lashing out at the mainstream media’s bias against you, that’s a good indication you’re carrying around reams and reams of baggage for which you have no legitimate answer. But it doesn’t matter.