Tuesday morning on The Today show, Matt Lauer had a very special guest on to deliver a healthy, unbiased opinion of George Bush's job performance in 2005-Ann Coulter. The vaudevillian writer who crafts wonderfully thought out arguments like:
We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war.
She was allowed to spend the morning in the homes of millions of people who might have never read her work before and Matt treated Ann as if she's a well respected scholar, representing the mainstream of America.
(see the video here)
Matt: Scale of 1-10, how bad was 2005 for the President.
Coulter: It ended on a high note--there were a few moments where he was down---
The only thing Coulter found wrong with Bush in '05 was the Harriet Miers nomination. Might you have expected Matt to ask her about Bush's failed plan to destroy Social Security which was his primary agenda for '05? How about the Vice President's right hand man being indicted that could earn him up to thirty years in jail? What about Tom Delay looking at the inside of a jail cell too? Maybe a background shot of Duke Cunningham crying after pleading guilty to taking more than $2 million in bribes. Could he have asked her how President Bush handled the little event called "Hurricane Katrina," which is a tragedy that has scarred the lives of many Americans and the whole republican leadership? Nope. Ann could have worn a pink, "I was attacked by Bill Clinton" t-shirt and Matt would have complemented her on the color. Lauer summed up the entire year for President Bush by stating that his approval ratings have now inched up past the Richard Nixon line. Way to go Matt, Karl Rove couldn't have done a better job.
On the new issue of domestic spying that the NY Times just exposed, Lauer set up Ann beautifully so she could smear Democrats. What's a Coulter without some slime, right?
Matt: Why do you like this subject as a conservative commentator so much
Coulter: Because it lured Democrats out of their rat holes to remind Americans that they can't be trusted with National security.
When Lauer brought in Colin Powell's reaction to the discussion, Ann's response was that FDR put loyal Japanese into internment camps as a defense for Bush circumventing the secret FISA courts. What was Matt's response to Coulter's horrifically racist answer?
Matt: We got 30 seconds left, lets talk about "Bush-backs-buxom blonde's-big-bucks-battle."
Matt has done some good work in the past, but maybe interviews like these are the main reason why so many Americans are so incredibly uninformed and still think Saddam Hussein had "strong links to Al Qaeda."
(You can check out more John Amato at CrooksandLiars.com)