Music Awards supersede 60 Minutes!

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2024

Bill Whitaker gets something right: How weird! But does it matter that 60 Minutes aired on Monday night, not on it's time-honored Sunday?

Was the audience smaller as a result? We have no idea.

That said, CBS made the obvious move. It bumped its election year "interview with the candidates" edition of 60 Minutes in favor of Sunday night's broadcast of the American Music Awards.

Let's face it! Within our failing civic culture, the Music Awards are the bigger deal—and everyone knows how this works.

We thought that schedule shift was remarkably strange. That said, Bill Whitaker asked a very basic, obvious question during his delayed interview with Candidate Harris last night. 

In fact, he asked the question three separate times! His first attempt went like this:

WHITAKER (10/7/24): You recently visited the southern border and embraced President Biden's recent crackdown on asylum seekers. And that crackdown produced an almost immediate and dramatic decrease in the number of border crossings. If that's the right answer now, why didn't your administration take those steps in 2021?

What explains the policy at the southern border during those first three years? We don't know if Vice President Harris even agreed with the border policy, but our public discourse is so juvenile, so underfed, that large swaths of American punditry act as if the policy there was somehow hers—as if she was the sitting president.

(That formulation controls the world on the Fox News Channel. Even here, Whitaker keeps asking Harris about "your administration." He never asked her if she agreed with President Biden's border policy in real time.)

For three solid years, President Biden failed to explain his policy at the border. We regard that vast silence as a vast derogation of duty—and it has saddled Candidate Harris with a policy question which is easy to formulate and very hard to explain.

At least, it seems to be hard to explain. When Harris didn't attempt to do so in her first exchange with Whitaker, he asked his question again:

WHITAKER: But I've been covering the border for—for years. And so I know this is not a problem that started with your administration.

HARRIS: Correct. Correct.

WHITAKER: But there was an historic flood of undocumented immigrants coming across the border the first three years of your administration. As a matter of fact, arrivals quadrupled from the last year of President Trump. Was it a mistake to loosen the immigration policies as much as you did?

With that, he had posed his question again. Again, the candidate failed to answer.

At this point, Whitaker asked for the third time. According to the CBS transcript, the full exchange went like this, continuing from above:

HARRIS (continuing directly from above): It's a longstanding problem. And solutions are at hand. And from day one, literally, we have been offering solutions.

WHITAKER: What I was asking was, was it a mistake to kind of allow that flood to happen in the first place?

HARRIS: I think—the policies that we have been proposing are about fixing a problem, not promoting a problem, okay? But the—

WHITAKER: But the numbers did quadruple under your—

HARRIS: And the numbers today—

WHITAKER: —under your watch—

HARRIS: —because of what we have done, we have cut the flow of illegal immigration by half. We have cut the—

WHITAKER: But should you have done that—

HARRIS: —flow of fentanyl—

WHITAKER: —should you have done that— 

HARRIS: —by half. But we need Congress to be able to act to actually fix the problem. 

Three remains the magic number. At that point, having asked his question three times, the CBS newsman moved on.

Question: As vice president, did Harris agree with border policy over the first three (plus) years?

We don't know the answer! Given the way our politics works, it would be hard for her to say that she had disagreed with the policy decisions even if she actually had.

Whitaker asked an obvious question. In fact, he asked it three times.

That obvious question remains unanswered—and this may hand the White House to Candidate Trump. Again, we think President Biden's years of silence constitute a major derogation of fairly obvious duty.

We Blues were still hailing the greatness of Biden's presidency right up to the time when he had to withdraw from the campaign. We humans tends to defer to tribal leaders, Blue folk as well as Red.

At any rate, how about them American Music Awards? Life inside a failing society can be major fun in real time!

Still coming: To this day, Harris is routinely accused of bungling an interview with Lester Holt about the southern border. 

That interview took place in Guatemala City in June 2021. But did Harris bungle the famous interview, or is it possible that the bungling actually tracks to Holt?

(We can't link you to a transcript of the interview. As best we can tell, and if so all too typically, no such transcript exists.)