Embarrassing. Last night, Ms. Couric interviewed Hillary Clinton for “60 Minutes.” Given the level of access and deference that show receives, both Couric’s Clinton interview and the preceding Steve Kroft interview with Barack Obama were up to the minute and might have turned out to be enlightening and news-making interviews. Instead, Couric shamed herself with a vapid and childish series of questions to the potential Commander-in-Chief.

Among the tidbits we learned: Clinton drinks tea not coffee, that she’s given up diet sodas because “they give you a jolt but it doesn’t last,” that she washes her hands or uses Purell to stay healthy and that were she to lose her bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, she’ll be happy to return to being a simple senator from New York. Is any of this information relevant when she’s facing the mother of all nomination battles?

Early on, Couric couldn’t seem to let go of one really nagging question: Doesn’t Mrs. Clinton get down? In her deepest darkest moments, doesn’t she think about losing? Thankfully, Clinton didn’t lower herself to the bait. She smiled and when Couric finally stopped blathering, replied that she didn’t let herself think that way.

Even when the interview got to substantive issues, Couric didn’t listen to her subject and failed to ask any challenging – or really any – follow-up questions. Clinton attacked John McCain for saying he’d be OK with the U.S. staying in Iraq for 50 or 100 years, saying she wold never let that happen. But we’ve been in Germany for over 60 years and we’re still in Korea and Vietnam, does Clinton want to get us out of those commitments, as quickly as she seems intent on getting out of Iraq? Couric didn’t care to find out. (Steve Kroft didn’t see fit to follow up on Obama’s similar attack on McCain, either.)

At the time, there was a lot of discussion about Couric moving from fluffy “Today” into hard news and becoming the first woman news anchor. Whether she can indeed deliver a serious news broadcast every evening is not at issue here. What is at issue is her ability to sit down with serious people, who are engaged in serious endeavors and talk to them at their level. Her performance last night proves that she really should just stay behind the desk and deliver the lines scrolling on the teleprompter.

David Hazony is actually too kind to “Israel’s paper of record,” Haaretz, when in an earlier post he says one of its editorials exposes the paper’s “severe disconnect with the Israeli public.” Haaretz is not disconnected; rather, it is connected—fiercely so—to its vision of what Israel should be.

Two recent stories serve as perfect examples. First, an op-ed column by Tom Segev on the 60th anniversary of the United Nations vote to partition Palestine into two states—one Jewish and one Arab. Segev is one of Israel’s preeminent historians and a regular Haaretz contributor. On this occasion, rather than express any sense of celebration, gratitude, or even mild happiness that the UN voted in favor of a Jewish State, Segev decides to question the legitimacy of his own country. “With every settler who moves to the territories and with every Palestinian child who is killed by Israel Defense Forces fire, Israel loses some of the moral justification that led to the decision on the 29th of November 60 years ago,” Segev explains. The editors of Haaretz publish such opinions—and worse—on a daily basis.

But Haaretz’s ideological crusade is not limited to the editorial or opinion pages. Its editors are only too happy to publish defamatory feature stories as well. On November 30, the weekend section of Haaretz (the equivalent of the New York Times’s Sunday Magazine) featured a cover story on the Shalem Center, a Jerusalem think tank that, incidentally, used to employ Mr. Hazony. A shorter English version of the article is available here. So egregious were the mistakes and so blatant the inaccuracies that the Shalem Center posted the following response on its own Web site. Haaretz has thus far issued no correction nor has it provided space to rebut the claims made in its original article. And for good reason: The sole purpose of the story is to disparage a think-tank whose world-view the editors of Haaretz oppose. But instead of a feature analyzing the center’s stated beliefs versus its accomplishments, or even questioning the legitimacy of Shalem’s Zionist mission, the story deals in gossip, supposed improprieties, and the personal habits and salaries of Shalem’s founders. This is worth 4,500 words? It is when your goal is to defame an organization whose success you envy and whose vision you loathe.

Haaretz is often described as Israel’s New York Times, and when it comes to ideological crusading, the two papers do resemble one another. Except that the New York Times doesn’t stoop this low.