What the F*@k Is the Matter with You?

Don't put liars on your news shows, you fools.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Bob is down with the flu in a strange and foreign land. He’ll be back with a fresh column next week, should he survive. Meantime, here’s a blast from the past.

My dream interview program, when I still dreamed about interview programs, had the working title: What the Fuck Is the Matter With You, with Bob Garfield. The concept was to single out a politician or other public figure who that week had said or done something outrageous and invite them on the show. My first question would always be essentially the same:

“Senator Menendez, you were found with bricks of gold hidden in your home. What the fuck is the matter with you?”

“Governor Noem, you wrote a campaign bio for your VP ambitions, and you bragged about shooting your dog. What the fuck is the matter with you?”

“Justice Ginsburg, you are dying of cancer and if Trump wins you’ll almost certainly expire during his term in office, allowing him to nominate Tourqemada in your place, yet you haven’t retired. What the fuck is the matter with you?”

Sadly, the show never came to pass. Obviously it would have been wildly popular, but the budget was an issue. The producers would have to pay the booker $10 million a year. Because it’s no cinch persuading someone to be interviewed on a show called What the Fuck Is the Matter with You?

The fact is, it’s hard to book any news-interview show with a politician willing to come on and straightforwardly answer questions — especially modern Republicans whose entire platform and messaging strategy is based on the endless repetition of Big Lies, ordinary lies and gross distortions that twist nominal, decontextualized truths into incendiary false allegations. When challenged with indisputable facts, they instantaneously change the subject.

What percentage of the time? 100% of the time. Yet producers persist on booking them, as if their sterling hosts will elicit a dramatic confession, like Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men. As if Ted Cruz, under pressure on ABC’s The View, would suddenly blurt out, “All right! Of course ‘rigged elections’ are a lie! Of course when I say ‘The American people are concerned about free and fair elections,’ it’s because my party has been brainwashing those idiots for five years. Yes, five — even before the last presidential election took place. Of course we are doing this to undermine voter trust. Of course I was right the first time, in 2021, when I called Jan. 6 a ‘violent terrorist attack.’ Of course we are rationalizing the insurrection as if it weren’t a lethally violent attempt to stop democracy in its tracks! You caught me! I am an apologist for treason!”

No, what he blurted out was, “Did I miss an entire year of Antifa riots where cities across this country were burning?” Two points for Cruz there, both a subject change and a lie! Antifa, whatever it is, was not behind protests over the George Floyd murder; that was Black Lives Matter. There were many acts of vandalism and arson over four months of angry civil rights demonstrations, but cities did not burn, let alone for an entire year. Nobody died. No democratic process was impeded. No gallows were erected. No asshole senators had to flee for their lives.

Did The View imagine that Cruz would say anything different? Did they think he would be the first demagogue in broadcast news history to melt on live TV, like the Wicked Witch of the West, when doused with the cold water of truth? If they did, they’re fucking stupid. If they did, they are vain beyond words. If they did, the result was to generate more propaganda enabling MAGA to seed doubt with the electorate. Neither the public interest nor the sacred role of journalism was served.

Another pitiful example featured Sen. Tim Scott, the reactionary bigot with VP aspirations, on CNN with host Dana Bash. As all such hopefuls appear in public as proxies for Donald Trump, Bash asked him to account for Trump’s claim that the FBI agents who executed the Mar-a-Lago stolen-documents search warrant arrived “locked and loaded, ready to take me out” like some sort of Democratic assassination team. For obvious reasons, all search warrants have language permitting cops to be armed just in case, including those who searched President Joe Biden’s garage for classified documents. “Do you agree with the attorney general,” Dash asked, “that this is not only false, what the former president said, but extremely dangerous?”

Check. Checkmate!

Yeah, no, Scott just prattled on with the GOP’s “two-tiered justice system” talking point. Bash kept at it, creating the illusion of journalistic determination, imploring the politician to respond:

BASH: I just want to -- one last time, what I’m asking you about is rhetoric that could end up dangerous. And you keep answering about Joe Biden. So, is there anything you want to talk about with regard to that rhetoric?

(CROSSTALK)

SCOTT: Well, the rhetoric that really concerns me is not coming out of e-mails. They’re coming on college campuses, when we’re seeing the actual physical violence against our Jewish students playing out. What we’re seeing is antisemitism spreading. We’re seeing the spreading of hate. We’re not having to figure out what’s going to happen. We’re actually seeing violence on college campuses, and yet the Democrat Party sits there, hands folded, letting it play out.

Robert Costa, of CBS’s Face the Nation, fared no better. He thought he’d pinned Scott into acknowledging MAGA criminality on Jan. 6.

COSTA: Should you be- ever become vice president, whether it’s this time around or in the future, an important question is how do you specifically see the role of Vice President on the day of congressional certification? What do you believe, Senator, is the role of a vice-president on the day of congressional certification?

SCOTT: Well, here’s what I’m not going to do is answer questions that are hypothetical about the past. The one thing we know about the future is that the former president, fortunately, he’ll be successful in 2024, he won’t be facing that situation again. So what we should focus on is what will cause the former president, President Trump, to be the next president of the United States. It will be those issues that I’ve articulated, in addition to that, the lack of law and order in the streets of America. I’m not going to sit here and have a hypothetical conversation--

(CROSS TALK)

COSTA: No I’m not asking you about- Senator …

SCOTT: … about something you and I both know, cannot happen--

COSTA: Senator, I respect your point of view-on that, but –

SCOTT: … and that is just a fact.

COSTA: I’m not asking you a hypothetical question. I’m asking you a constitutional question. How do you see the role of vice-president in terms of the congressional certification?

SCOTT: The constitution is very clear.

COSTA: So- and you stand by your decision.

SCOTT: This… this… this… of course I do. There’s not a question that we’re going to ask and then have answered about the past. I’m not changing my position. I’m stating very clearly that the American people are very concerned about 70,000 Americans losing their lives to fentanyl. And you’re asking a hypothetical question that you know has no actual ground to stand on for the future. We’re talking about 10 million illegal immigrants coming across our southern border. And according to the Biden administration, 85% of those folks allowed into our country. We’re talking about the- the loss of law and order in the poorest communities in this country. Instead of having conversations about these incredibly important issues.

I ask you: what is the point of that exercise? At best it’s a sort of journalistic virtue signaling — see how we bravely held his feet to the fire? — but the only effect is to platform political lies and evasions. That not only doesn’t serve the constitutional protections for a free press, it’s an insult to them.

Granted, there are times in an interview — usually on a fresh, not rehashed, controversy — when a question is more important than the answer and a lie or evasion critically revealing. I have a few of those on my reel myself, notably one about five years back with Glenn Beck. But when those lies and evasions are inevitable, and the “interview” a mere pas de deux, no journalism has taken place. “One last time” should not apply to any question; all it does is assure the subject that he’s once again succeeded. Compare that nonsense to the great Jeremy Paxman of the BBC, who in 1997 asked the same question of former Home Secretary Michael Howard 13 times until he was satisfied he had caught the politician in a lie. You might also be amused by my own interview with a senior Exxon-Mobil official on whether the company had funded climate disinformation campaigns for decades in spite of its own data confirming catastrophic atmospheric and ocean warming.

Modern American news formats, alas, don’t permit such persistence. The host has a list of questions to get through and cannot linger on any, even if it has been unsatisfactorily answered. And, as we have seen, it is always unsatisfactorily answered. The current grandmaster of this technique is Sen. JD Vance, another VP hopeful, who in recent weeks has made fools of both CNN and CBS.

Here he was with Kaitlan Collins on CNN after complaining that campus protesters who were disorderly in support of Palestinians weren’t thrown in jail:

COLLINS: OK, so you agree that people who break in and vandalize a building should be prosecuted.

VANCE: Yes.

COLLINS: OK, I’m just checking, because you helped raise money for people who did so on January 6, which was, you know, impeding an official proceeding, breaking into a building that they weren’t allowed to be in, and vandalizing the Capitol.

VANCE: Well, Kaitlan, I know this is the obsession of the national media to talk about what happened two years ago—three years ago, on January 6 … Now, again, there are people who are accused of worse offenses, and that’s a problem, but you can’t have Black Lives Matters protesters who rioted and go free, when you had people who were actually peacefully protesting on January 6 who had the book thrown at them—that’s the double standard that I’m most worried about.

On CBS, anchor Margaret Brennan asked Vance to account for Trump’s lie that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi turned down his offer of 10,000 National Guard troops to battle the Jan. 6. mob. Trump had never requested troops and Pelosi as Speaker had no authority to invoke military assistance (though she was filmed during the insurrection begging for Pentagon assistance). True, she was also filmed regretting not making sure her own Capitol Police force was better prepared (even though that duty fell to the Sergeant at Arms), but she has never claimed responsibility for security failures. This was Brennan’s line of questioning about Trump’s baldfaced lie.

BRENNAN: He falsely claimed that the Speaker of the House at the time turned down 10,000 soldiers that he had offered to keep the peace ahead of Jan. 6, something his own acting secretary of defense testified to Congress did not happen ... Why make false claims?

VANCE: I think the media’s running interference on a lot of this stuff. We all know, and Nancy Pelosi herself has admitted on camera that she could have requested more National Guard troops [and that] she bears some responsibility for the fact they weren’t there at the Capitol.

BRENNAN: Chris Miller said that he was never ordered by the president to send [10,000 troops] to the Capitol that day.

VANCE: Nancy Pelosi has said on camera, Margaret, that she bears some responsibility for the fact that the National Guard didn’t play a big role.

Alas, Jeremy Paxman was not available for followup. As the old saying goes, you can’t tell a booker by the coverage.

All of these programs should be canceled, on the grounds of dereliction of duty and malignant incompetence. Ostensibly, they exist to hold public officials’ feet to the fire. But really what they do is aid and abet arsonists in lighting the truth aflame.