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Media Matters

All last week, actress Janeane Garofalo was the co-host on CNN's Crossfire. We were fortunate enough to obtain a transcript of the first test show.

Producer: All right, Janeane, the main point of this is to relax now that the studio is empty, run through the show and get you comfortable with the way we do things.

Garofalo: Okay, that's great. Just remember, my hair is blonde now so I may not learn things as quickly as when I was brunette.

Producer: Ha ha. Very good. Ha ha. Tucker, you okay?

Carlson: Don't worry, we've been calling that "the dumb blonde chair" every since Paul Begala started. As long as you don't mention my bow tie, I won't mention how you worked with Sylvester Stallone in Cop Land.

Garofalo: Oh. Oh. Good one from the crypto-fascist imperialist conservative environment-raper.

Producer: Let's keep it a little lighter and I'll read the announcer open and off we go. "Today on Crossfire; Live from George Washington University --

Garofalo: They should call it "Evil Rich White Colonial Slave-owner University" but that's just me..

Producer: ...and keep going everyone, "It's Janeane Garofalo and Tucker Carlson!"

Carlson: Welcome to Crossfire. All this week, we've enlisted actress and political activist Janeane Garofalo to join in on the debate. Now, let's go to the best political briefing in television, our Crossfire Political Alert.

Garofalo: So I read my part now, right? Okay, here are the latest pictures from Iraq where, over the weekend, saboteurs blew up a Baghdad water main and set two oil pipelines on fire. The destruction was supposedly the work of pro-Saddam loyalists but I saw on some website that it was really done by the people of Iraq who the Bush Cheney Cartel has totally alienated and they now see us as a hated occupation force. Thanks, Bush Cheney Cartel, thanks a lot.

Trust me when I tell you that you don't want to alienate your audience. When I was doing Reality Bites back in 1994, there was all this buzz that it was going to be the Generation X movie but then the studio over-promoted it or something and there was a real backlash. Everyone was like, "This is such a bogus, packaged, focus-grouped Hollywood product" --

Carlson: Whoa, whoa, Can we take a moment here?

Garofalo: Was that too inside, the Reality Bites stuff? Because I was going to riff into something about how I worked with Winona Ryder and how Bush is trying to shoplift Iraqi oil.

Producer: Hm.

topics:
Mainstream Media, Television, Environment, Hollywood, Iraq, Oil