Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney may’ve stumbled during Wednesday night’s CNN/YouTube debate, but it appears CNN has come away the real loser.

Literally minutes after his “don’t ask/don’t tell” question, Keith Kerr, the retired gay brigadier general whose ignominy became ubiquitous everywhere yesterday on cable news but CNN, was outed by a blogger as something else: a sitting member on the steering committees of Veterans and Military Retirees for Hillary and LGBT Americans for Hillary.

To win over Republicans leery of getting a fair shake from what some detractors call the “Clinton News Network,” CNN said vetting YouTube submissions would be “a laborious process.” It promised “to wean out the Democratic ‘gotcha’ questions,” since the point of the debate was “to let Republican voters pick from among their eight candidates.”

The reality? Of the other 31 videos CNN selected out of the 4,932 submissions it received, at least seven others — which, alongside Kerr, account for more than a quarter of those posed — came from anyone but:

(1) Log Cabin Republican David Cercone asked candidates if they would accept his group’s support if pledged, but he’s already pledged himself to Barack Obama — on the senator’s campaign site.

(2) LeeAnn Anderson, the woman who squatted next to her son and Chinese adopted daughter and asked about lead in children’s toys, is an aide to Leo Gerard, head of the United Steelworkers Union and a vocal Edwards supporter.

(3) Journey, the young female abortion questioner, donned John Edwards ’08 gear in this YouTube video posted yesterday, and apparently has an pro-Edwards banner on her personal blog.

(4) Adam Florzak, who asked the question on Social Security reform, has ties to Democrat Dick Durbin’s Senate office.

(5) Mark Strauss, who pleaded for Ron Paul to run as a third-party candidate (perhaps to siphon votes off the GOP?), is a Bill Richardson supporter. More injurious for CNN, he asked a question in the Democrats’ YouTube debate in July. He told The Huffington Post that CNN even asked him to shorten that submission to 27 seconds. “CNN didn’t just ‘pick the questions,’ ” says The Post’s interview. “They identified contributors and in some cases worked with them to shape the video.”

(6) Ted Faturos, the corn-subsidies questioner, worked in the office of California Democratic Rep. Jane Harman.

(7) David McMillan, who inquired about why the GOP doesn’t attract more black voters, has other pro-Edwards and anti-Republican YouTube videos.

(Additionally, for what it’s worth, Yasmin, the Muslim girl who appeared in her hijab, has interned for the Council for American-Islamic Relations, a group with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and not happy with GOPers’ handling of terrorism.)

Though even Charles Krauthammer says he doesn’t understand “all the fuss,” the Republican objections revolve around two valid points. First, that the substance of those questions may be fair game, but it is manifestly deceitful to stack the deck in a GOP debate with anti-GOP questioners, who for the most part asked the very gotchas CNN promised to “wean out.” At their YouTube debate in July, Democrats didn’t face any GOP confederates or Kerr-esque plants. (In fact, they even refused to consider a Fox News-sponsored debate for that very reason.)

Second, while debate moderator Anderson Cooper flatly denied any preknowledge, he’d have everyone believe the rest of CNN, during its “laborious” vetting, is too incompetent to think of Googling Kerr and other objectionable questioners (including the one from the Democratic debate)? The fact that Kerr alone, of all the audience members, conveniently got camera close-ups, a mic (and another when the first failed) and an extended rebuttal to candidates’ answers makes the expedient oversight excuse almost unbelievable.

Of course, the fact that Kerr’s been interviewed on CNN before (twice), coupled with the fact that he’s one of eight questionable questioners in a field of 31, makes it that much harder.