Sarkozy Storms Off 60 Minutes Set

[Van23]

Run time: 01:11 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkapbaK32PM   Posted on YouTube: October 29, 2007 By YouTube Member: Views on YouTube: 0   Posted on DU: October 29, 2007 By DU Member: Van23 Views on DU: 2368

 
Good for him!!!

More politicians need to do this. There's too much discussion of BS private matters in the media that have nothing to do with IMPORTANT stuff. It's nothing but a tabloid distraction.

Clinton should have just said "None of your f****g business" the first time he was asked about Lewinsky rather than trying to cover his ass by lying.

[silverweb]

1. Beautiful

Even more beautiful that he did it with such finesse.

He didn't "storm" off the set. He said "merci" and shook her hand and smiled, then walked out -- leaving the interviewer sitting there looking stunned and very, very foolish.

I loved it! :D

[Van23]

3. I agree

He showed a lot of class when he terminated the interview.

[Julius Civitatus]

2. Good for him! I hope Amereican politicians follow his example

The media has a juvenile obsession with the private lives of politicians, as if they were supposed to be at a superior, "supra-human" level as compared to the rest of us.
Good for Sarkozy. Well done. His private life is none of our business. Period.

[mconvente]

4. Indeed, nice move by Sarkozy

He isn't at all the most revered person here at DU (in fact, I think most people don't like him) but this was a good move. If all celebrities and politicians would simply say "thank you" and end an interview after being asked a personal question, then eventually the media would learn not to ask them. The reporter for CBS was horrible. She kept prodding and prodding him for an answer, almost with a smirk on her face. Horrible reporting.

[Van23]

5. I don't care for him either...

But what he did was great!

[Dave From Canada]

6. I agree, he handled it very well. I'm guessing that he probably told CBS that he wouldn't answer

any questions related to his private life/divorce.

[maxkeiser]

7. Viva La France... remember when America used to have some pride in itself?

i live in paris;
a country where the president can tell an ahole CBS hack to drop dead (nicely)
a country that files a war-criminal charge against rummy the second he touches down on french soil
a country where the gov't is afraid of the people and not the other way around;
in short, a democracy, not a neo-feudal, fascist wannabe like America...
As he was walking off the set he mentioned that he thought the questions were stupid and that he did not have time
to waste on stupid questions.. he's world leader that recognizes how badly the US has plunged the world into chaos and he is
working his tail off to restore some kind of world order left to rot by US corporate-kleptomaniacs...
viva La France, and Viva the Euro... (now up 60% from what I paid for mine)

[Van23]

8. Viva La France

+1

Most right-wingers in the US who trash France forget that the United States wouldn't be the United States if it weren't for French military aid during the Revolutionary War.

[RufusTFirefly]

9. Imagine if news shows actually covered news

I'm no Sarko fan either -- he's dismantling the French welfare state -- but there used to be a time when you could differentiate between the news and supermarket tabloids. Not any more.

[Joe Chi Minh]

21. That's the thing about the right, whether a noble or an ignoble savage,

a right-winger will usually show some kind of common-sense in such situations. Just some measure of self-respect, however scarily absent on the larger scale.

Most of them are human with some of the goodness and much of the badness that that will normally entail, but often with the natural common-sense so often lacking in the left. They know who they are, scary as that might seem to others.

I believe it's why Sarkhozy was elected. He thinks like ordinary people about pressing problems and evidently connected with them in relation to them. It doesn't mean that either are right. They will lie to the public almost all the time, but at least they don't need focus groups to tell them how or about what.

The most striking exemplar of this bizarre and utterly imponderable kind of quasi integrity, I think, is Buchanan, the racist Republican who, in 2002, came straight out and said he didn't believe he could possibly have won Miami Dade, with so many Jewish constituents in it. Another Republican candidate could have been suicided for doing that!

[izquierdista]

10. Interesting what CBS edited out

Apparently, Sarkozy called her an imbecile for asking such a question as he was taking off the microphone. It didn't make the American translation, but when I saw it on РТР Планета, they made sure to translate the French into Russian for their audience.

[RufusTFirefly]

11. No. He called his press secretary an imbecile. Big difference

He was pretty polite to the interviewer.

[lil d]

14. It was the press secretary

He's right, but either way, the French man was pissed!

[gateley]

25. Hi - welcome to DU!

:hi:

[RethugAssKicker]

12. Great little thing he did there...but...

Sarkozy is a RW fuck....

I am sure even Hitler did some things we would all agree with!

[maxkeiser]

15. i don't believe Sarko can be dismissed so easily...

his green initiatives are strong and real... he will try to pull down some of French civil society; but will he succeed? let's see what the voice of the french people say... it's up to them; we can't equate france to America - where democracy has been picked clean;

also, keep in mind no country in the world is as dangerously anti-democratic as the US right now.. Sure, there are countries in Africa, Burma, N.Korea, etc. that are worse on a per capita basis - but not on an aggregate scale of overall damage.. As bad as n. korea is, 99% of the damage it does is self-inflicted and self-harming whereas the US is the world's leading polluter and exporter of war and torture

- and this offsets any good the US is doing regionally in various enclaves.. for this reason the world is rejecting the US dollar; and the sooner the dollar collapses, the sooner the scourge of US policies gets cut down to size.. and this collapse too will be self-inflicted.. and self-harming (we have a Constitution, why it's being ignored is the problem, but only for the US, the rest of the world can get along great without a fully functioning US).

i'm not advocating a strike against the US, i'm just standing by and letting the controlled demolition of its currency - by insiders - at goldman, jpmorgan, lehman, etc. - proceed (and yes, i own lots of gold).

[theshadow]

13. I remember when Lesley Stahl....

.... was a journalist, not just another hack.

[liberation]

22. Was she ever?

I don't really know much about this lady.

However, she acted yet another freaking American reporter with way too much sense of entitlement and not enough class/touch to realize that the first "no" was enough. He politely told her that his personal life was not to be discussed, much less by a two-bit foreign journalist. There is plenty of material to be discussed regarding Franco-American politics. She is a pre-programmed bot and she was not able to recover and politely change the subject, instead wasting a foreign president's time.

Frankly American press has been reduced to tabloid journalism, and this exchange proved that. The fact that this idiot reported was flabbergasted by the "audacity" of the French president to demand some sort of decorum and respect, only drives the point even harder. I am sure the irony of it all flew at supersonic speeds over the head of this lady.

A lot of people seem to think that Europeans can be rude sometimes, but honestly it can be very tiring when one has to deal with certain Americans who have the mental development of a ten year old. Why is a portion of this society still fascinated with sexual innuendo, is as if they never grew their early high school developmental phase....

[DFW]

16. Sarko handled this perfectly

It reminded me of Chris Wallace trying to harass Bill Clinton on Faux.
This little trick of "everybody's" asking/saying/talking about some personal
matter is getting tired and overused. Not "everybody," but rather bought-out
media hacks who are looking for ratings rather than news. French policy of
engagement with Iran? Continuing to stay out of Iraq? Coping with industrial
action from some of Europe's most powerful unions? No, CBS would rather
try to make news out of his personal life. Sarko would rather they didn't, and
the egg on her face when he took off could only have been made better if it had
been freshly fried and scalding to her skin.

[YOY]

17. Good for him...it's not like he has to worry about upsetting our "value voters"

His personal life is none of our idiotic corporate presses' business.

[seeker4ever]

18. Fuck her. Good for you Sarkozy. (eom)

[Joe Chi Minh]

19. I suspect if he'd had to put up with the same kind of journalists' knavery Clinton had to,

when he was supposed to be holding some sort of public Q an A with Yasser Arafat by his side, he'd have had them frog-marched out by security. Collars felt in no uncertain terms.

And as for the harridan with the gin-sodden croak who kept bawling out, "Mr President", did you sleep with Monica Lewinski?" (The iconic moment of the hunting of the President), perhaps she'd have been prosecuted for lewd behaviour in a public place!

[Sam Ervin jret]

20. Clinton should have done the same thing, with a thank you, but no thank you I will not answer that.

[Joe Chi Minh]

23. Yes, I said from the get-go that if he admitted what they wanted him to,

he deserved to be locked up! It was NONE of their business at.all! In fact, it would have been a wonderful base from which to really sock it to the Pharisees in your body politic, full bore. Imagine! A grand jury to investigate a President's personal sex life!

[gateley]

24. I've always thought that as well. And that's what he also should have said when

asked if he wore boxers or briefs.

Edit: spelling (looked as though a freeper had written it!)

[MindMatter]

26. Nice to see a conservative worth admiring

I get really tired of the nonstop parade of aholes and incompetents on the American conservative side. I have admired some of the things he has tried to accomplish since taking office, and now I admire him even more.

I remember a time when 60 Minutes would deal in at least a little substance.

[bagrman]

27. I guess some people mean NO when they say it.

[Apollo11]

28. Marital problems are not the same as taking advantage of interns

Clinton should have publicly confessed and apologised for his misbehavior in the Oval Office. There is no way he could have just refused to respond to the allegations agains him.

The Sarkozy case is completely different. His wife has asked for a divorce and he is refusing to talk about it to foreign media while he is representing France abroad. Good for him!