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.

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.”

OPPORTUNITIES KNOCKED: Daley’s on p. 1 of Chi Trib as genial fun-loving talk show personality. Why? He’s on hot seat, isn’t he? Why give him the foto-op for free? Or anyone else, including GW chopping wood, etc.

Why not? Because it encourages jerks like Gov Blago to lift up his 3–yr-old as hostage when he finds himself in war zone attacked by reporters. He picked her up after they began badgering him — when all he wanted was a foto-op, for crying out loud!

HEAD TRIP: Sun-Times had that item big on p-1, rightly so. But moving to its op-ed page, we ask, who is Ralph Martire, whose stuff reads like a memo to staff? We have an email address but no i-d for this producer of turgid prose. And where the heck is Tom Roeser, who used to fill us in on Illinois politics on that very page? Martire’s a lobbyist, which Roeser used to be but hasn’t been for several years, and besides, he had life for a long time as City Club rejuvenator and, yes, real-life talk-show host, which he still is, Sunday nights, WLS-AM. And besides with a flourish, Roeser knows how to write for THE PUBLIC — see his daily blog.

Martire’s organization is the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability — maybe for motherhood too, who knows? — where he is executive director, for crying out loud. He must know what he’s talking about, whatever it is. What he needs is a writer. Get the guy or gal who does Rev. Jesse’s boiler-plate leftism, also regularly in Sun-Times. (Oh, am I mad today. You’d never know I’m entertaining lovely grandchildren this week, would you?)

HERE COMES JUDGE: While in Sun-Times op-ed arena, see Judge Egan dismantle DePaul law prof so-&-so for his statute of limitations argument meant to show Egan up for his non-prosecutable verdict in the Burge torture business. In addition to substantive stuff, several times he notes the man’s “academic” aura as leaving him unsuited for solving this problem. He also notes that the two presumed good-doing lawyers who objected to his decision — Flint Taylor and Locke Bowman (no relation) — were asked during their investigation to show cause why the statute did not limit but didn’t. Good piece.

SO THERE: As for Ozzie Guillen, and you knew we’d get to him, didn’t you, he’s in his nasty-kid mood these days about shortstop Uribe, who has to come to Ozzie to say he wants to play: Ozzie is not going to him, no. Uribe has to come to “the boss,” you see. That’s how it’s done in the Land of Ozzie. None of which matters today, of course, Contreras that beautiful Cuban exile from Castro having blanked the first-place Tigers on three hits last night.

CONFESSION: Then there’s Gunter Grass, who after years as a professional Leftist Novelist, with a book of memoirs to sell, says he’s been “burdened” all these years knowing he served in the Waffen SS (storm troopers) and so now, finally, with book of memoirs to sell, tells us. Here’s it’s time for him to don sack cloth and pour ashes on himself and enter a monastery, and he’s got himself a book-selling point. It’s people like that who give Leftism a bad name. Among others.

DEATH OF A GOOD GUY: Finally, R.I.P. Al Kirk SJ, who was found dead in his room at Loyola U. at 72. For years he was head head-knocker at St. Ignatius High, Chicago — disciplinarian. I met him as an incoming novice at Milford OH in 1952 but my best memory is of him at Ignatius, where I showed up one day to interview a student for a series at the Daily News.

I bounced into his office on a lower-level floor as students were charging out at day’s end. He just walked out in the hall and collared one walking by, a Bridgeporter whose take-home books included a paperback copy of Royko’s Boss — assigned reading. The kid made a very good interview. Boss had gotten Sis Daley very mad; she had tried to get it removed from supermarket shelves in Bridgeport. Royko got wind of it and, what do you know, out went next day’s column on that very subject.

For the same DN series, I went to Gordon Tech at Addison & California on the NW Side, where the Resurrectionist principal led into my presence a hand-picked senior, an all-honors student heading for West Point. Good interview too, but my, the contrast with Al Kirk and the climate at Ignatius.

This widely reported photo-doctoring by Reuters seems ideology-driven, the photographer being an Islamist sympathizer. Reuters has admitted the fakery and fired the fotog. This interviewing of and platform-providing for this year’s Hitler clone by CBS’s Mike Wallace, on the other hand, seems something else. Let’s call it whoring after audience share.

They file Michael Sneed among “people” columnists at Sun-Times, with the reliable and readable Bill Zwecker (H’wood), Stella Foster (Kup’s heir), Cindy Pearlman (also H’wood), and the incomparable (to what shall I compare her?) Susanna Night Out (photo-op shots of fun-timers grinning ear to ear). But she does like to be a regular Democrat tell-all sometimes, as today, when she refers to the Republican candidate with slight lead over Toddler Stroger in the county board presidency race as Tony “The Whiner” Peraica.

She had just puffed Toddler with an item about State Sen. Mike Madigan having “handpicked” Toddler’s campaign manager, noting that both Madigan and Toddler are Ignatius High graduates. (Has she ever noted that stepdaughter Lisa, the state’s attorney general is a Latin School alum?) The campaign manager is one Mike Noonan, from whom she quite likely got the “whiner” bit.

Not only that, she used it in reference to “GOPers . . . wishing they had a stronger candidate,” which is the perfect nasty item to plant, because Peraica does a lot of complaining, though not about trivial things, which is what whining is, but about huge waste thru patronage in a miserably run $3 billion operation.

And ditzy though shrewd Sneed injects this Dem-campaign bit a few pages in today’s paper before a full-tabloid-page story about the county’s health department as exposed by Northwestern U. researchers as hugely wasteful and miserably run.

When does interesting mean disgusting? When LA Times man Tim Rutten does a lead ‘graph on Mel Gibson as noxious:

Given all that’s been written and broadcast about the anti-Semitic tirade Mel Gibson delivered when he was arrested on suspicion of drunk driving, it’s interesting that the story’s most significant implication barely has been touched. [Italics added]

If Gibson were not a wealthy and widely admired celebrity, he’d be just another lush dragging around a mental rat’s nest of kooky opinions and morbid animosities. However, he’s not a noxious nobody; he’s a noxious actor and filmmaker dragging around a mental rat’s nest of kooky opinions and morbid animosities [repeated for emphasis] — and the only part of this affair that legitimately concerns anyone but Gibson and his family is whether any of those views made their way into his work.

And on goes Rutten, telling us what’s so darn interesting, i.e. disgusting, about it. “The press” — good for him, leaving stupid TV out of it — has not “reopened discussion” of Gibson’s movie “The Passion of the Christ,” which depended too much on Matthew’s gospel and what an anti-semitic nun wrote two centuries ago and in any case had a “sadomasochistic aura.”

Or did it? Rutten can’t quite say so but uses the venerated “some . . . argued” expression, allowing him to make the point while shrugging his shoulders. Not even neatly done, Rutten. But it’s interesting how you do it.

There’s more, which you can find here if you are willing to surrender some of your marketing demographics to his employer.

However: If kooky and morbid stuff came out of Gibson when roaring drunk, we know it was in him, else how did it come out? But his defenders, including the Jewish ones, hadn’t seen it from him in his sober moments, that is, moments when he was in control. I do believe our character depends on the latter moments. In this I am in tune with (a) how our society judges people — temporary insanity, anyone? and (b) the Catholic Christian teaching I grew up on, and millions of others too.

Rat’s nests? Please, we all have them, of one kind or another. Question is, what do we do about them? Sober, Gibson has done just fine, his friends say. Drunk, he becomes a man possessed, as if by devils depicted in Matthew’s gospel. So open the envelope and name the exorcist, please, 12–step program or whatever cleanses him. That will be the interesting part.