If I were tangled up in a scary spaghetti of my own lies — and Mayor Rob Ford is — I wouldn’t need a Fig Newton and a blankie for comfort, I’d need a nice soothing interview with the CBC’s Peter Mansbridge or CP24’s Stephen LeDrew.

They’re so emollient, so tender and kind. Fond as we all are of Mansbridge, in interviews he is a human sleeping pill. And LeDrew is your mom defending you in the principal’s office.

Have a comfy chair, they say to Rob and Doug Ford as they do their weird skanky tour of duty among broadcast journalists who never ask hard questions. Not comfy enough? Here are some soft cushions and some even squishier questions.

It’s a dog-and-pony show, Ford trotting out his routine — gravy, weepy Flaherty, health professionals, are you perfect I’m not — while Doug sits rigidly beside him in profile, his eyes glowing yellow like a wolf’s and scarcely blinking. Their script is memorized. It will not be interrupted.

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This interview-as-therapy maddens the Canadian viewer as Toronto’s greasy reputation solidifies around the world.

For the mayor has hard questions to answer. So ask them. I don’t mean moral ones, I mean specifics, such as “Why did your family have 26 ‘interactions’ with police in the past eight years? Explain.”

“In the rant video, who were you going to kill?”

“Why haven’t you voluntarily gone to a police station to answer questions?”

I don’t even understand why the police haven’t brought him in for an interview in the back of the cop car, stolidly protecting the top of his huge pink head as he slides into the back seat. We’ve seen it in cop shows. No one gives a toss what your lawyer says. You’re the mayor. Do it.

“What was in the envelopes and bags Sandro Lisi was photographed carting about in the vicinity of your Escalade? Why did you cut your hair super-short after the news of the video broke, and before you said your fellow councillors should be drug-tested? Were you worried about hair samples?”

“And, Mayor Ford, who is your friend ‘Alana’ who is not a prostitute? Where did you meet? At mayor school?”

TV and radio journalists have let slide Ford’s ridiculous claims of Toronto transformation. He did not save the city $1 billion. The Star’s Daniel Dale has meticulously destroyed that claim. Why didn’t Mansbridge’s producers hand him Dale’s story and ask him to refer to it?

Print journalists know how interviews fail because they learned the hard way, by failing. They are not interested in atmosphere, but facts. So haul some facts out of Ford, with a boathook if necessary.

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There is a reason pushovers are interviewing Ford, and not Kevin Donovan or Robyn Doolittle, who would ask crisp straight questions about criminality, not imaginary gravy.

What these journalists need is the Shark Week bucket of meat chunks you throw from a boat. You throw a meaty question at Ford, who ignores it. You throw it again. And again.

You do it 12 times, which BBC TV interviewer Jeremy Paxman famously did to Home Secretary Michael Howard in 1997, when he refused to answer a crucial question about having had a prison official unfairly fired. Referring to Howard’s subordinate, Paxman asked, “Did you threaten to overrule him?” With every repetition, he crushed Howard as a nation watched, entranced.

The video of this interview would stiffen the Mansbridge and LeDrew spine and those radio types lobbing soft-boiled (warm, un-shelled) eggs at Ford.

Rob and Doug are a dog and pony show. What worries me is that so many journalists are luring them onstage with squishy bait. There are even soft questions that aren’t being asked.

“Ab-sootley,” Ford tells LeDrew. “Zis city is 10 times better.”

Ford is noticeably slurring his words. Why is that?

Nobody has asked. LeDrew finished up. “Are you going for the title of The Comeback Kid?”

The three men giggled. “It’s nice seeing your pretty face,” Doug Ford told his merciless interrogator.

And the three grown men shook hands, a gaggle of self-love meeting self-interest. Oh how they laughed.

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