Hats off to our David Catron for his fine deconstruction in The American Spectator this morning of the much-overrated Chris Wallace.
Wallace is maddening. He’s not the search-and-destroy machine that his dad was. And he’s not the totally left-wing geek you encounter on other networks. But he’s a terrible questioner, not all that insightful, and judges the importance of the issues of the day in the same way the Swamp does. Catron nails it when he calls Wallace “just another insignificant swamp creature.”
Many of Wallace’s questions, which he doubtless considers tough because of the pompous tone he delivers them in, are really easy to avoid. Any halfway alert high school debate club member could maneuver around them while texting his girlfriend at the same time. His seasoned political guests go through them like a teenager blowing a stop sign. And while he doesn’t always share the conclusions of political and media Swamp creatures, he so often allows them to define what’s important and uses their frame of reference. I sometimes think if Chris’s New York Times didn’t land on his front lawn early on Sunday he wouldn’t know what to ask on Fox News Sunday. He would be left mute. Which is not altogether a bad thing.
Sometimes Wallace goes out of his way to prove that he’s not leaning to the conservative side. He feels obliged to ask gotcha questions of conservatives. I don’t at all mind conservatives being asked tough questions. But intelligent questions, please. None of your idiotic “fact checking,” as when Wallace tried to correct the Donald, who said Biden wants to defund police, and Wallace responds, “Sir, he does not,” and then proceeds to tell us that Biden only wants to “redirect” funds that have been going to police. (George Orwell, call your office.) Too bad the Donald wasn’t forensically nimble enough to reply, “Chris, please tell me the difference between defunding the police and redirecting money that would otherwise have gone to them.”
Choosing Chris Wallace was an unforced error. He may perform well tonight, but my expectations are low. The most seasoned, intelligent, articulate, and balanced Fox reporter, and the one with the most developed BS immune system, is Brit Hume. He would have made a much better choice.
