Round 2: Ahmadinejad vs Sawyer

Let's get the obvious out of the way on this one: Diane Sawyer is a low-grade telehost*** who has the intelligence of a doormat and knowledge of world affairs of your average American soldier: best described as zilch. Her pet peeves are a gray hair flickering amidst the blond, unshaven knees, and "news" gigs that force her to travel beyond New Jersey to the East and Orange County to the West to interview titillatingly calm world leaders whose panache and unbreakable hold on their interviewers makes her want to jump out of her chair and fondle them just to see if her purported (only by her, of course) sexual prowess can do anything as a final resort for domination.

In short, Sawyer's "news interview" (also known as a state-sponsored interrogation) this week with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will be a YouTube chuckler for some time to come. (Click here to see the video of the interview.)

As we reported during the previous attempt (see also here and here) by an American telehost (I believe they refer to them as "journalists" in the US) when Mike Wallace interviewed Ahmadinejad and fell to his knees shortly thereafter, Mr Ahmadinejad is impeccably in control in an interview setting -- in other words, he effortlessly propels the interviewer to desperation and emotional grabs for the steering wheel in an interview gone magnetically in his favor.

The best thing about the Sawyer interview, which like the Wallace one involves condescension and racism of a level that reminds one of the slave master's rancor toward a slave who knows who the real master is, was that Sawyer lost her temper, lost her false gentility and practically thrusts herself toward Ahmadinejad at times, only to be kept slightly at bay by her genuine concern that the headscarf she's been forced to wear (the hilarity of this power dynamic amuses me to no end) might slip and give Ahmadinejad the satisfaction of seeing her dark roots.

It seems the main purpose of the interview, aside from employing the US government's highly secret weapon intended as a last resort toward regaining power in the Middle East, known only by its code name "Condi's Legs", was to inform the dangerously underinformed American public that while billions of their US tax dollars have been squandered on weapons and genocide in Iraq, while thousands of their young soldiers have been murdered by their own government in a sadistic rampage of profit, the much bigger danger to world peace is that a handful of grenade launchers found in Iraq have been identified as having Iranian serial numbers. The level of stupidity at play here is astronomically astounding.

The interview is riddled with laugh out loud punchlines mostly due to the fact that Sawyer proves her inexcusable ignorance about very basic facts pertaining to Iraq, Iran, Middle East politics and culture, and, well, anyone at all who doesn't wear Chanel lipstick or drive a tractor. One particularly entertaining highlight was when she pretty much gave away a state "secret" when she accepted Ahmadinejad's insinuation that the American government and forces have been active in organizing the killings of Shiites in Iraq. She then goes on to ask "Are you here to solve the problem of the American government in Iraq?" thereby capping off an already embarrassing litany of confessions.

And in a final bullet to the heart of her nadir of professional credentials, Ahmadinejad struck at the one thing an American "journalist" cringes at: accusations about sources:

Sawyer: You said you have 52,000 suicide bombers. Where would you deploy them?

Ahmadinejad: Did I say that?

Sawyer: One of the Iraqi officials said that...

Ahmadinejad: [laughs] Well I think you should check your source...

(Sawyer has now publicly admitted that "Ahmadinejad was right to challenge me, it was not a statement by an official but a so-called unofficial organization dedicated to suicide bombing.")

God I hope more American telehosts do these filmed interviews with Ahmadinejad -- they not only serve to embellish an already gratifyingly high level of disdain for the American media worldwide, but also keep us all entertained for hours on end.

***just for the record, The Saccharinist coined this term, in this article, on this day.