The Real Goal of Having Chris Wallace on This Program

Imus knows his voice is hoarse, so for Chris Wallace to belabor the point this morning by pointing out that the croakiness makes listening to this show an unpleasant activity was unnecessary and mean.

Wallace, the host of Fox News Sunday, admitted it was his intention to make the I-Man feel bad. “I figured I’d go there first,” he said, referring to his and Imus’s tendency to hurl insults at one another.

By commenting on the issue of whether a Muslim group should be allowed to build a mosque near Ground Zero, President Obama, who endorsed the project last Friday and then backed off the following day, made a mess for himself and for the Democrats.

“There is no way that talking about this benefits Democrats in any way, shape, or form,” said Wallace. One of those Democrats is House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who did her best Joe McCarthy imitation this week by demanding an investigation into which group is sponsoring an ad campaign against building the mosque.

“The argument that we need to know where the funding for the mosque is coming from is not totally irrational—there have been a lot of charities over the years that have been used to fund terrorist organizations,” Wallace said. “But the idea that if an organizaion wants to exercise its First Amendment free speech rights by saying they’re against the mosque, that they should be investigated…it does smack of McCarthyism.”

Imus, for one, is more concerned with just who is sponsoring Pelosi’s Botox injections. And with getting Wallace to step in it by asking him how many Muslims are in the world; what percentage are terrorists; and how many sympathize with the terrorists’ cause. Suffice it to say, Wallace had no idea about any of this.

Having sufficiently flabbergasted his guest, Imus declared that he actually finds this information irrelevant, leading Wallace to ponder the purpose of the last few minutes of his life.

“It’s about getting somebody on the program to say something they then have to go on their own program, in your case Fox News Sunday, to explain what they meant,” he told Wallace, who has been there and done that.

But the jig failed today, as it did yesterday with Glenn Beck, who, by the way, might go blind, though Imus hopes he doesn’t.

“Really,” Wallace said. “That’s very nice of you. Is there anybody you hope goes blind? Besides me?”

Not right now. Check back tomorrow.

-Julie Kanfer