Someone Wants a Job at Fox News

The right wing blogs are all worked into a lather over an interview Joe Biden did recently with WFTV, a local television station in Orlando.  They seem to think Biden somehow embarrassed himself or got rattled during the interview.  The fact that they think that is further evidence of the rapidly widening gulf between the reality most of us inhabit and the alternate universe where most right wing bloggers now reside.

In the interview, Biden never loses his composure, despite being bombarded with questions that were so ridiculously loaded and counterfactual that Sean Hannity would have been embarrassed to ask them.  Here's the interview in its entirety.  You be the judge:


For those of you who can't see the video, here are the six questions asked by Barbara West, the WFTV anchor. I'm not cherry picking here; these are the only questions she asked:

1) Aren’t you embarrassed by the blatant attempts to register phony voters by ACORN, an organization that Barack Obama has been tied to in the past?

2) But in the past Senator Obama was a community organizer for ACORN, he was an attorney for ACORN, and certainly in the Senate he was a benefactor for ACORN?

3) Senator Obama now famously told Joe the Plumber he wanted to spread his wealth around. A Gallup poll showed 84% of Americans prefer that government focus on improving economic conditions and creating more jobs in the U.S. as opposed to taking steps to spread wealth. Isn’t Senator Obama’s comment a potentially crushing political blunder?

4) You may recognize this famous quote: “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” That’s from Karl Marx. How is Senator Obama not being a Marxist if he intends to spread the wealth around?

5) Now you recently said “Mark my works, it will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama.” But what worries many people is your caveat asking them to stand with him because it is not going to be apparent initially that he’s right. Are you forewarning Americans that nothing will be done and that America’s days as the world’s leading power are over?

6) Getting back to the spreading the wealth question, what do you say to the people who are concerned that Barack Obama will want to turn America into a socialist country like Sweden?

That's it. That was the entire interview. The woman was like a cartoonish caricature of a wingnut, and her questions were straight out of a Steven Colbert interview. I kept waiting for her to ask Biden when Obama stopped being a member of al Qaeda. At one point, toward the middle of the interview, Biden actually had to stop and ask the anchor--in all seriousness--if she was joking. I don't blame him. The questions were so off the wall that he had to have been wondering whether this was some sort of Daily Show-esque mock interview.

And just in case you think this is an example of dumb local reporter trying to be provocative (as opposed to mindlessly partisan), here's how the same anchor began her hard-hitting interview of John McCain the week before:

Senator, in dozens of states the group ACORN is accused of filing thousands of bogus voter registrations. In Central Florida they even tried to register a Mickey Mouse and one person here in Orange County was registered 21 times. Now Senator Obama served ACORN and its associates as an attorney on voter registration and on cases involving subprime mortgages, which led to our current financial crisis. Now why haven’t you gone after him on these serious issues of voter registration fraud and the mortgage crisis?

Now that's a hardball question.

But now that you've seen the interview, let's revisit the right wing response to that interview. Michelle Malkin describes it as the "best interview of Joe Biden ever." She ends her post with this:

She was completely professional and gracious.

But remember: Anything less than total sycophancy from the Obamedia is considered “combative.”

Keep Barbara West in your thoughts and prayers.

Huh?  Thoughts and prayers?  I'll pray that she gets help.  And asking childishly partisan questions with glaringly false premises is "completely professional"? Maybe if your profession is Republican operative.

In response to the interview, the Obama campaign (understandably) cancelled an interview of Jill Biden scheduled on the same station next week. This provoked the right wing blogs to lash out at the Obama campaign and accuse it of, among other things, being cowardly and trying to suppress the freedom of the press (here's a particularly unhinged example of this sort of response).

I know this goes without saying, but these are the very same people who have spent the last few months defending the McCain campaign's policy of hiding Sarah Palin from the mean scary press. I can only imagine the collective freak out these folks would have if Palin had been similarly ambushed in an interview. But since she doesn't do interviews, they don't have to worry about that.