For Once, Chris Wallace Informed About His Own Show

Initially, the point of putting Chris Wallace on this show every Thursday was for him to promote what was coming up each week on his very fine program, Fox News Sunday. Sadly, Wallace is rarely privy to this information.

So one can imagine the I-Man’s elation upon learning that Carly Fiorina, the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in California and former CEO of Hewlett Packard, was already scheduled to join Wallace this week.

“She’s going to have to explain why she laid of tens of thousands of people,” Wallace said, referring to the 30,000 or so who were let go during Fiorina’s tenure. He disputed Imus’s notion that her problematic relationship with HP’s board of directors would resonate with voters, calling it “inside baseball.”

“If somebody’s a jerk, and you can’t get along with anybody, and you wind up, in the view of some people, ruining a great company, as many have charged Ms. Fiorina of doing, then I think thing the public would relate to that,” Imus said. “Don’t you?”

But Wallace was more focused on the watermelon-sized softball Imus lobbed at him, and could barely contain his laughter as he said, “If being a jerk was a disqualifying factor, how do you explain your longevity?”

Mission accomplished, Wallace moved on to Imus’s next question: Why has President Obama not spoken with Tony Hayward, the CEO of BP, about the oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico?

Wallace had no answer, other than to call the excuse White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs gave yesterday—that the President “respects the board and he understands the board are the people in control”—lame.

“It’s got to be hard, and perhaps unprecedented, and maybe impossible to plug the hole,” Wallace said of the leak on the ocean floor. “But they don’t seem to have marshaled enough resources to capture the oil before it hits the marshland, and those sweet little pelicans.”

Imus?A former White House Correspondent during the Reagan administration, Wallace was in a unique position to comment on Helen Thomas’s recent remarks about Middle East politics, among them that Jews should leave Israel and go back to Germany and Poland.

“She has misused and abused her position for years,” said Wallace, noting that Thomas, now 89, was widely considered “the dean of the press corps” when he was there. “Quite frankly, she became a cranky old lady. And her questions really ceased to be questions, and became attacks and screeds against U.S. and Israeli policy in the Middle East.”

Wallace then commented on the “cranky old lady”-ness of the photo Fox was showing on television, but was informed by Bernard that it was actually a shot of Imus.

“Have you and Helen Thomas ever been in the same room at the same time?” Wallace asked Imus. He later added, “At a certain point—and I don’t want you to take this personally—we’ve all got to be responsible for understanding when our time has passed, and we’re an annoyance, and a speed bump in the public eye.”

As for who will get Thomas’s prized front row seat in the White House briefing room, Wallace observed the “poetic justice” if someone from, say, Fox News, were to fill the seat of Thomas, who is obviously pretty far to the Left.

Realizing Wallace had placed his foot squarely in his mouth, Imus said, “Say hi to Roger when he calls you later.”

-Julie Kanfer