Starry eyes, whoa-oh!

Tom Degan wrote in from New York to point out Chris Wallace’s FOX interview with former Vice President Cheney, noting that, “Someone described it as a starry-eyed teenage girl interviewing one of the Jonas brothers”.

Indeed, sir, and thank you for raising the point; that would be Mr. Sullivan:

Now look: there are softball interviews; and then there are interviews like this. It cannot be described as journalism in any fashion. Even as propaganda, which is its point, it doesn’t work – because it’s far too cloying and supportive of Cheney to be convincing to anyone outside the true-believers. When it comes to Cheney, one of the most incompetent vice-presidents in the country’s history, with a record of two grotesquely botched wars, war crimes and a crippling debt, Chris Wallace sounds like a teenage girl interviewing the Jonas Brothers.

My two favorite moments:

CHENEY: I am going to — if I address that, I will address it in my book, Chris.
WALLACE: It is going to be a hell of a book.
CHENEY: It is going to be a great book.

And then the apology for asking the questions Cheney wanted asked:

WALLACE: Well, we want to thank you for talking with us and including in your private life putting up with an interview from the likes of me.
CHENEY: It’s all right. I enjoy your show, Chris.
WALLACE: Thank you very much, and all the best sir.

When future historians ask how the United States came not only to practice torture but to celebrate it and treat torturers as heroes, a special place in hell among the journalists who embraced and justified it should be reserved for Chris Wallace.

Of Hell, Greenwald notes,

That’s going to be a very crowded place (see here for more on Wallace’s particularly well-deserved consignment to that locale).

I don’t know, though. I haven’t watched the interview. Dick Cheney is one of those people I’ve enjoyed not needing to pay attention to; since he stopped being vice president, it’s been something like a cross between bad stand-up comedy and an old-tyme circus geek show. I keep expecting to find him sitting in a bunker somewhere sucking the kidneys out of liberal bloggers’ children, or something. There’s an old Hap Kliban cartoon called “Show Your Symptom” ….

Anyway, thanks Tom.