It'll Never Happen Again, Chris Wallace

Though he’s scheduled to appear at 7:30am each week with the I-Man, it would be naïve of Chris Wallace, the host of Fox News Sunday, to assume he’ll actually go on the air anytime before 7:35.

So when he complained about today’s 7:41 start time, Wallace was met not with apologies from the host of this program, but with protests of, “It doesn’t make any difference.”

To prove his maturity, Wallace moved on, telling Imus it matters little what the President says about the ongoing BP oil disaster at today’s press conference, or during tomorrow’s trip to the Gulf Coast.

“There’s only one thing that matters,” said Wallace. “Do they plug the leak, or do they not plug the leak?

President Obama has been criticized more by the Left than by “right-wing nuts” like Wallace (Imus’s words), which Wallace said speaks to “an unpleasant and inescapable” fact.

“It may be when you have an unprecedented leak at an unprecedented depth, basically a mile underneath the surface, that the government can’t do very much,” he observed. “People keep saying, ‘Let’s take control, and push BP out of the way!’ Well, I’m curious what assets the U.S. has to plug a leak a mile down.”

Wallace was also curious about something else this morning. “Have you and Joe Cocker ever been in the same room at the same time?” he asked Imus.

Watching last night’s American Idol finale, in which Cocker appeared, Wallace had been confused. “I thought, what the hell is Don Imus doing there?”

The guest line-up for this Sunday’s show remains unknown, but Wallace promised, “We’re going to have really good guests this week, as we did last week.” Sadly, Imus missed last week’s installment of Fox News Sunday because…um…his television broke.

“That’s what you’re going with?” asked Wallace, still ticked off that discussion of what he thought was John McEnroe’s new book set his appearance back 10 minutes.

Actually, it was the I-Man’s aggravation with Patrick McEnroe that had delayed Wallace. “We weren’t fortunate enough to get the McEnroe who actually had some tennis talent,” said Imus. “We got his dopey brother.”

-Julie Kanfer