My weekly date with Hugh Hewitt was a zippy romp through the news of the day, starting with the revelation that the shady, shifty, murky donors to the Clinton Foundation include not only Ukrainian oligarchs, Saudi princes and sinister foreign governments, but also contraception awareness-raiser George Stephanopoulos:
HUGH HEWITT: Mark, I'm going to start with the George Stephanopoulos story, and I am not surprised that George Stephanopoulos gave money to the Clinton Foundation. I do not know what all the yelling is about. But there is a lot of yelling. What do you make of this?
MARK STEYN: Well, I'm not surprised, either. He's been a Clinton man since he was out of short pants. And he then went into a very successful media career with ABC... At the time he left the White House to join ABC, we were assured that he could become an objective journalist, and he was putting aside the Clinton phase of his life. And now it turns out that the Clinton phase of his life has continued, and so he's been making donations to the Clinton Foundation. And so we are in the absurd situation... only under the peculiarities of America's mainstream media could you have an interviewer interviewing a man who has written a book disclosing the dodgy donations to the Clinton Foundation without the interviewer disclosing that he himself is a donor to the foundation... I don't mind what people do with their money. I just think they should be up front about it.
HH: Yeah, the Schweizer interview is the single misstep here, because I, you know, I don't care what people do with their money, either. If I interview Tom Cotton, people need to know I've contributed to Cotton many times over the course of my career. And I'll continue...
MS: Right, but you're very up front about that, Hugh.
HH: Yes.
MS: You're up front about who you support, and who you advise your listeners to donate to. George Stephanopoulos purports to be something closer to the media equivalent of a Supreme Court justice, that he is dispassionate and simply distributes media justice fairly. And that's the difference... One of the signs of decay in free societies and civilized societies is that you have the outward signs of apparent normalcy, but in fact, their meaning has been utterly hollowed out. So when you talk about the Schweizer interview, if you were just a casual... low information voter, as someone says, and you switch on ABC and you happen to see this interviewer interviewing a fellow who's written a book about the Clintons, you assume it's an honest interview. And this is not an honest interview any more than that was an honest question four years ago in New Hampshire. And that's the issue. You've got the forms of normalcy, but underneath, all has been perverted.
After a comparison of the Israeli, British and US elections, Hugh's inner optimist came out:
HH: This is my optimist coming to the fore. I think it's possible to beat Hillary Clinton, although the Electoral College is a heavy handicap on the Republicans, because she doesn't have the first African-American president momentum behind her. She doesn't have the touch that Obama has. She may be the worst major party candidate in modern times, don't you think?
MS: Well, that's what they said about John Kerry, but he got more votes than any other Democrat had ever got ever in the history of lousy Democrat candidates.
We also touched on Mark Halperin's celebrated "Are you really Hispanic? Could you do the Mexican Hat Dance for me? Can you say "Lucy, choo got some 'splaining to do' in an amusing accent?" interview of Ted Cruz. Expect a lot more of this from the court eunuchs of the Democrat media as the months go by: Cruz and Rubio aren't real Hispanics, Ben Carson isn't a real African-American, Carly Fiorina isn't a real woman, Jeb Bush isn't a real Bush, etc, etc. My advice to the guys is to mix it up a little:
MS: Well, yeah, I thought the Halperin interview was interesting. He shrugged it off. You know, I'm always surprised to discover Ted Cruz is Hispanic, because I think of him as a Canadian.
HH: (laughing)
MS: So I think his answer to favorite food should have been poutine, and his favorite music should have been Celine Dion.
After a word about Rand Paul and the media, and Ben Carson and foreign policy, we concluded with the President's summit with himself:
HH: None of the Sunni Arabs showed up at the President's party at Camp David. Do you think that he's done, the President's sole diplomatic achievement is bringing the Israelis and the Saudis together?
MS: Yeah, and the Gulf monarchs. I mean, King Hamad of Bahrain skipped this summit in order to go to the Royal Windsor Horse Show with Queen Elizabeth. That's basically the diplomatic version of 'I'm washing my hair'.
You can find the full interview here.