Catching up with an admission from just after Tuesday’s Republican presidential candidate debate in Las Vegas, CNN’s Anderson Cooper lightheartedly conceded that when he confronted Herman Cain with his earlier criticism of the Occupy Wall Street protests, a criticism Cain reaffirmed to rousing audience applause, Cooper hadn’t intended it as a softball but as an embarrassing mis-cue from which he expected Cain to backtrack.

“Sort of teed it up for him there,” Cooper fretted in his post-debate hour after re-playing his exchange with Cain, “I didn’t really mean to. But he clearly just knocked that one out of the park. I mean, and it was obviously -- at least for this audience in this hall, that played very well.”

Full transcript in the cross-post on the MRC's NewsBusters blog.