Day: August 15, 2006

Knock-Out

NY Sun has a quite reasonable, telling commentary on the Wallace-Ahmadinejad interview, “a journalistic coup” that found Wallace not “up to the task . . . outfoxed, outwitted, and outflanked.” He was

hesitant in this interview, unwilling to press the wily Iranian president, and was thrown off stride by the tough, even snide, comebacks, including a threat to end the interview prematurely.

Moreover, Mr. Wallace seemed unexpectedly charmed, perhaps even won over, by the president, which also may have dulled his usually sharp instincts.

“It wasn’t even close,” said David Harris, of the American Jewish Committee.

Here was a chance to press the leader of a country that seeks nuclear weapons, actively supports Hezbollah, calls for Israel’s annihilation, engages in terrorist activity far from its borders, imprisons political reformers, protesting students, and independent journalists, subscribes to a disturbing theology, and suppresses the rights of the Baha’is, among others.

Oy veh.

The Judge Who Couldn’t Stop Lying, etc.

My friend in Queens, Nicholas Stix, discusses a certain kind of judge here.

He calls him a “high hat,” using the Harry Truman phrase. Yes, as in “Miller’s Crossing,” the Coen brothers movie that opens with the dago [sic] pleading with the Irish mob leader. People were “high-hatting” him. And it was set in a Kas. City-like burg, thus the Harry S (no period) Truman usage.

And Stix’ sister finishing liars’ (law) school where she learned how to use a convincing item, the bat!

However, for “since long-defunct,” my friend Usual Usage says put “long-since defunct.”

In the relevant literature arena, for turning “minor infraction [into] major felony,” see Peter Peebles in Walter Scott’s Redgauntlet, which beat Bleak House to the punch by half a century in telling of law’s delays with Peebles as marvelously comic complainant-victim being also to blame. Set in Edinburgh, 1770s or so.

As for the ineffable Rev.-Sen. Meeks, who wants better teachers in ghetto schools, does he have combat pay in mind? Trouble is, many teachers won’t go there for love or money. Put another way, there’s not enough money to pay them to go. Let us call Meeks, ah, unsophisticated in his approach, which presumes and counts on a very unsophisticated constituency. It won’t fly: this may be the Second City, but its voters are not dumb. (Are you sure about that? a small voice asks.)

Now he’s the celebrity

Oh boy, if you were wondering about Mike Wallace whoring after audience share, you will find this at Power Line “interesting,” as the columnist says when he means disgusting. The PL man cites questions “Mike Wallace forgot to ask” sent by a reader, such as “Would Osama Bin Laden be a welcome guest in your country?” and “Should Muslims living in Western nations be allowed to apply sharia law within their communities, or must they follow the laws of their country?” adding this of his own:

[Wallace might have askee] perhaps immediately after []his attestation to the great honor of interviewing him:

Do you think that the United States has a legitimate bone to pick with you in connection with your leadership of the student group that took 66 Americans hostage in the American embassy in Tehran in 1979?

There once was a Mike Wallace who asked tough questions — his was a “no-holds-barred interviewing technique,” says CBS. It’s how he got his start or made his initial splash, in the early days of TV, with a “Confidential” show in which he got celebs to come on camera and then put embarrassing questions with patented Idon’tgiveashit look in his beady eyes. Now with a 4th– or 5th-generation Hitler, he plays softball.

For a good rundown on the interview, go here, where Media Research Center’s Tim Graham acknowledges “Some Tough Questions” in the Iran interview while citing “Some Apple-Polishing Interludes.”