You rarely see an interview these days in which a host asks a guest a genuine, valid tough question…"tough" in this case meaning that it punctures the guest's entire shpiel. Bill Maher did in the other night on Real Time when he had on billionaire T. Boone Pickens.
Pickens is out pushing an "energy independence plan" that would harness wind power to get us off oil. There are those who claim that this is not altruistic; that the man has set up companies that would make zillions from any such plan. Never mind that for the moment. He's also been a big supporter of candidates who actively crusade to take us in precisely the opposite direction. He was, for example, a major backer of those "Swift Boat Veterans" ads that helped keep George W. Bush in the White House. In the last three or four minutes of the interview, Maher brings up these contradictions…and Pickens really has no answer…
