In defense of Dumbleyou on “60 Minutes”

A performance review.

Last night, my friend Cliz called me up (on the phone) to rant about the 60 Minutes interview she’d just watched with GW. She used terms like “blood boiling” and howled in derisive laughter at W describing himself as “the educator-in-chief.”

The interview hadn’t aired on Christmas Island yet (different time zone), so I had to send her away frustrated. But having seen it now, I felt compelled to come to Dumbleyou’s defense. Following is that noble, futile effort:

Dear Cliz,

Wow, do you have a low Dumbleyou threshold. In relative terms, this was a stellar performance. Only a few of his ‘tells’ were in evidence and he was generally on his best behavior. And the piece seems to have been edited together by Karl Rove. Was it only a day ago that Condi was caught on mic, off the record, confiding that along with the guys at Fox, all of whom she looooves, that 60 Minutes’ Steve Kroft would be another journalist she would deign to allow to interview her?

Haaaa-aaaccckk!! Sorry, just coughed up a furball.

Content-wise, this piece offered nothing new, but that’s one of the hallmarks of W’s administration. He’s like a big dumb porch dog who only has one idea, and pursues it to the exclusion of everything else. No doubt, if W could lick his own balls, we wouldn’t be in Iraq today.

But there was no major oratorial malfunction, no Freudian Slips and the buzzwords were hewn (or edited) down to their bare minimum. On a performance level, I’d have to give him a solid B (he missed the “A” only as a result of there being no bullhorn handy nor pile of dead bodies to climb up on before speaking).

If this tame MMM-WAH! for the cameras got your blood boiling, it’s a good thing you don’t watch his more freewheeling press conference interviews. Those are the real syntactical train wrecks, where the lies are spread like fairy dust on Christmas morning...

Tonight, there’ll be the Golden Globes to look forward to – helpfully tape-delayed on the West Coast so we can read all about the wrap-up online before the show even begins on our TVs. When do you suppose the network Suits will figure out this is a scheduling scenario in need of an overhaul? So far, only the Oscars consider themselves important enough to go live at 5PM PST.

That’s why they’re the Oscars, darling...