I intend fully to read “Fire and Fury” when it arrives in my mailbox in a few days.
My initial intention was to purchase it off the shelf at Barnes & Noble when it was released, then I decided to order it online, via Amazon. It will arrive soon.
There. That said, I watched “Fire and Fury” author Michael Wolff make an ass of himself on CNN, when host Michael Smerconish sought to ask him what I considered to be a legitimate question.
Smerconish, who told Wolff he “tore through” the book, wanted to know if Wolff misrepresented his intentions to the Trump administration when he gained access to the White House and was allowed freedom to talk to many key aides to Donald J. Trump.
I did not hear any inherent bias in Smerconish’s question. Wolff, though, took extreme offense at the question and the questioner. He ended up saying that Smerconish was “doing the White House’s job” by impugning his integrity.
Actually, Smerconish did nothing of the sort. He asked a perfectly appropriate question in his search for complete context in how Wolff was able to report in his book the statements attributed to the likes of former Trump political strategist Stephen Bannon.
So … Wolff finished the interview. Smerconish has become a sort of media Celebrity of the Moment with his questions and the confrontation they produced with the author of a much-discussed book about the president of the United States.
My advice to Wolff: Settle down, dude. And if you’re going to bristle at questions posed by a middle-of-the-roader like Michael Smerconish, you probably ought to stay away from Sean Hannity and his cohorts at Fox News.
Here’s the relevant portion of the interview. It’s worth your time: