Jeff Greenfield Didn't Call Anybody a Crook. Imus Did.

Equipped this morning with a strange southern accent (being from the southern part of New York State, of course), CBS News’s Jeff Greenfield told Imus that he had finally finished his book. When Imus inquired about the book’s topic, Greenfield insinuated he had already divulged this information, but was reprimanded by the I-Man, who can’t be expected to remember a silly little thing like the subject of Greenfield’s dopey book.

“I don’t know what I was thinking,” said Greenfield, always contrite. As for his book, he added, “It’s a blend of fact and fiction. Kind of like journalism.”

Also kind of like The New York Times, Imus joked, observing that the normally left-leaning outlet came down hard on President Obama for last week’s speech about the oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

“I think, to some extent, it was because he got into what should now be almost banned,” said Greenfield. “Which is the old idea that, ‘If we can put a man on the moon, we surely can…’ and then you fill in the blank.”

He continued, “The proper way to think about that is, ‘If we can put a man on the moon, we can put a man on the moon.’ It tells you nothing about whether you can plug a hole in a leak 5,000 feat beneath the ocean. It doesn’t tell you that you can cure incurable diseases. It doesn’t tell you much of anything.”

Greenfield noted the progressive Left’s uncharacteristically critical response to Obama’s Oval Office address, and shattered the illusion that presidents can make happen whatever they wish.

“This may be a demonstration of something a lot bigger, and it’s something that presidents are almost forbidden to say, which is, ‘There are some things that we don’t know how to do,’” said Greenfield.

The idea that there was already a mechanism in place to fix the leak was, in Greenfield’s view, an uncomfortable fantasy.

Even less comfortable is discovering the state of affairs at the Mineral Management Service, which Interior Secretary Ken Salazar was supposed to have cleaned up when he took over in 2009. A recent article in Rolling Stone Magazine that highlighted this and other flaws in the Obama administration underscored Greenfield’s initial point.

“This is a very tough look at the Obama administration from a source that should be it ally,” he said of the also left-leaning Rolling Stone Magazine.

Imus, for one, was never fooled by Obama, who turned to “crooks” like Bob Rubin and Larry Summers to fix the financial crisis, despite promising to change the culture of Wall Street.

“That’s perhaps a tad overwrought,” Greenfield said of Imus calling Rubin and Summers “crooks.” Greenfield instead characterized the two as “folks who clearly were part of the binge of the late 90s.”

“In other words,” said Imus. “Crooks.”

-Julie Kanfer