60 Minutes Mutual Love Fest

There was an old joke that there were two things a business executive never wanted to hear from his secretary: 1. "There's someone from the IRS here to see you"; or 2. "There's a 60 Minutes crew with Mike Wallace waiting outside to talk to you." Wallace was the fiercest of the TV interviewers and made many bad guys very uncomfortable.

So when Wallace was invited to interview Iranian madman Mahmoud Ahmadinejad one might have hoped for some of that old fire in confronting a guy who is seriously threatening peace in the world. Instead, Wallace gave the guy a 60 Minutes massage and played right into the hands of the Iranian nutball's P.R. machine. Jeff Jacoby has more:

NEVILLE CHAMBERLAIN flew to Munich to see Adolf Hitler, Walter Winchell observed in 1938, ``because you can't lick a man's boots over the phone." Why did Mike Wallace fly to Tehran?

Wallace's bio at the CBS website lauds his ``no-holds-barred interviewing technique," but there was no hint of it Sunday, when ``60 Minutes" aired his interview with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of the virulent Iranian theocracy that is the world's most active sponsor of jihadist terror.

Time and again Wallace let Ahmadinejad brush him off with inanities and lies he would have pounced on had they been uttered by a business executive or an American politician. When Wallace asked why Iranian Revolutionary Guards are helping terrorists in Iraq kill US soldiers, Ahmadinejad's non-reply was that the Americans shouldn't be in Iraq, since it is ``a civilized nation with a long history of civilization." The ``60 Minutes" star's withering rejoinder, according to the transcript: ``Mm-hmm." Wallace didn't press for an answer to his question, so Ahmadinejad flung it back at him. ``According to international laws," he said, Iraqi security is the responsibility of ``the occupation" -- that is, the US military. ``Why are they not providing security?" The befuddled Wallace changed the subject.

And that, more or less, was the story of the interview. Wallace would pose a question, Ahmadinejad would swat it away with a preposterous retort, and Wallace would move on to something else.

Asked about the thousands of artillery rockets provided to Hezbollah by Iran, Ahmadinejad sneered: ``Are you the representative of the Zionist regime or a journalist?" Confronted with Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons, he declared that President Bush and his supporters want to monopolize energy resources and ``line their own pockets."

You're a bigot who despises ``the Zionists," Wallace challenged him. Not at all, said the man who wants Israel ``wiped off the map," I merely despise ``heinous action."

You can read the rest of it here.

I didn't watch the interview, especially after reading Wallace's fawning comments about Ahmadinejad. I'm not a fan of either guy, and the idea of watching this mutual admiration society for any length of time was repugnant.