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Wednesday, June 29, 2011

GOOD GRADES AIN'T BRAINS. The Chris Wallace story's been covered, up to a point, by Hotair (1, 2). Actually, there are two stories, reported separately. There's the Chris Wallace-Jon Stewart debate story. And there's the Chris Wallace asking Michelle Bachmann if sheas a "flake" story. What no one seems to realize is that they're the same story.

I don't intend to make too big a deal out of it, but Chris Wallace is something of a jerk. The much promoted pride and joy of his Sunday show was a response to the internet attention his interview of Jon Stewart inspired. I don't know it, but I suspect that the response, which concluded the show, was filmed in advance, much like the "Power Player of the Week" segments that usually occupy that slot. In which he referred to the Michelle Bachmann interview that opened the show as an example of his tough interviews of Republicans.

In other words, I suspect that he deliberately mauled Michelle Bachmann in order to convince Daily Show visitors that he was acceptable in their journalistic terms. He deliberately crossed the line in his Bachmann interview to curry favor with Stewart's lefty audience.

Which makes him a louse. And his subsequent apology to Fox viewers both disingenuous and contemptible.

Yeah. I could be wrong. But I don't think I am. And if I'm right, is it really so surprising? He' the son of the ultimate MSM symbol of tough, confrontational journalism, a man who has repeatedly been shown up as a phony on the lavishly overpraised 60 Minutes. Mike Wallace was a newsreader and narrator, not a journalist. Producers did the journalism, such as it ever was, and then Mike Wallace was wheeled in at the last moment to ask scripted gotcha questions, sometimes with no one else in the room. As he's gotten older, Mike Wallace has gotten crazier and crazier, and like Walter Cronkite, he has spoken in public enough to make it clear that he's no mental giant. He's just an asshole with a scary leftist bent. Why does anyone think Chris Wallace is, in any regard, a conservative? Or, for that matter, a smart man?

He isn't. Yeah, he went to Harvard. I presume he took Ec10, the standard economics course most undergraduates wind up taking if they're majoring in Government (Harvardese for political science). So why is he so smug and prideful in his adherence to the static model of the U.S. economy exposed here?

His presidential candidate interviews have all been rendered irrelevant by his continuing, arrogant insistence that raising taxes on the rich will raise sorely needed revenues and that all cuts to programs like Medicare are the same cuts, all equally injurious to their benficiaries. It's illiterate garbage. But just like his dad, he hammers: Where are you going to make up the revenue lost by maintaining the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy? And when he asks Michelle Bachmann if she's a flake, he's revealing his true colors as a second-generation snob of the fourth estate.

I grant that Republicans continue to fumble the answer to his tax question, but that doesn't make Chris Wallace smart or the time he spends beating a dead strawman worthwhile. It makes him one more MSM flack doing the work of the beltway establishment. Which explains why he would compromise the integrity of his show to placate a darling of the DC celebriuty circuit and his followers. In Chris Wallace's world, Jon Stewart is important.

He's not important in mine. Nor is Chris Wallace. He's just one more dimwit beltway mole in the MSM. Something you should know.

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