This Weak With Christiane Amanpour.

I never watched This Week With George Stephanopoulos. (I don’t watch any television on Sunday morning. Unless it involves toast, I’m not available until noon.) Yet, I wish I had seen the debut of This Week With Christiane Amanpour this past Sunday (8/1). Not all of it, just the part when Ms. Amanpour interviews Nancy Pelosi. According to Alessandra Stanley in today’s (8/2) New York Times, the show’s host confronts the Speaker of the House with the Time cover photo (7/29) of a woman mutilated by the Taliban and asks if America will abandon the women of Afghanistan. When did Sunday morning talk shows become an extreme sport?

I admire Nancy Pelosi. Anyone who can wring legislation from that dirty mop called the House of Representatives gets my respect. As for Christiane Amanpour, she’s a justifiably famous and respected foreign correspondent. What’s more, she has a British accent, which, among broadcast journalists, connotes authority. At least, it did until Lara Logan began to studiously undermine it. So, why would an otherwise civilized person like Ms. Amanpour drop an earless and noseless woman in Ms. Pelosi’s lap? Did she expect fresh insights? Off script revelations? Did she think The Speaker of the House would go rogue? Instead “She made her guest recoil and look away,” Ms. Stanley writes, and “Ms. Pelosi, though startled, gave fractured, politic responses.”

I know what Ms. Pelosi should have said when asked if our country will abandon the women of Afghanistan. “To the extent that the U.S. entered Afghanistan in order to protect women, no. To the extent that any war in the world has ever been fought to improve the status of women, no.” Does Ms. Amanpour honestly think that ending the mutilation of women, a profoundly worthy goal, has ever been our objective in Afghanistan? First, believing that there was a goal or strategy when we began fighting there is beyond generous. Second, if it’s a goal now, you can bet it’s well behind stopping the killing and maiming of American soldiers. The horrifying debasement of women deserves ten Sunday morning programs. Yet, Ms. Amanpour relegates it to one question intended – in lurid, tabloid style - to embarrass a member of the current administration. If she thinks that will make it a national priority, that she can effect policy in this way, Ms. Amanpour is foreign to the ways of Washington and has no correspondence to “Network hosts . . . chosen for their experience and air of calm detachment.” People like, well, George Stephanopoulos.