Flush twice... it's a long way to Sally Quinn's place!

Pundit Pap
for June 13, 2004
The "No Coattail" Effect
by JJ Balzer

June 13, 2004 (apj.us) -- WASHINGTON -- The lazy, less-than-enlightening weekend political-news talk shows were a bigger disappointment that usual.

Most of them focused on the continuing chaos in Iraq, Saudi Arabia and (in the cast of "Meat" the Press) Afghanistan, with at least some mention of the grand and ritualized ceremonies preceding the burial of former president Ronald Wilson Reagan.

Most mention of The Gipper was reverential -- it was the only topic on The McLaughlin Group Therapy Half-hour as John and Pat consoled each other in their grief over the death of the Great Napper, while the ever-astute David Corn threw plenty of cold water on the festivities. But... but... but David, It's McLaugh-in -- where the first three letters in funeral are supposed to be f-u-n! How could you?

It's worth mentioning that Nancy Reagan was spoken of with great sympathy after having cared for her ailing husband for the past decade. There was speculation on how much progress her push for more research into the causes and prevention of Alzheimer's disease, including stem-cell research, would go, with most feeling the impact of her views would eventually win the day.

The handful of pundits who did make mention of former Texas governor George W. Bush's all-too-obvious effort to "ride the coattails" of the Reagan legacy weren't buying. At this point, we want to mention that we received an e-mail from one of our readers yesterday with an attached Bush campaign button featuring a Photoshopped pic of Bush and the Gipper together, with the caption, "Win one more for the Gipper." We could not resist cooking up our reply to that button:

That, pretty much, is what the few pundits broaching the comparison between Reagan and Bush the Younger were saying -- going well beyond merely saying that there is no coattail effect. But the best such scathe was not on the boob tube this Sunday, but in the New York Times' Arts and Leisure section in the form of a must-read Frank Rich commentary first published Friday in the International Herald-Tribune.

So, with Ronald Reagan buried, the attention of news and political junkies can finally return to issues at hand -- on this Sunday, the worsening situation in a sizable chunk of the Arab world. And there the news was not good this morning: a car bombing and assassination in Baghdad, and the murder of an American contractor outside Riyadh along with the reported kidnapping of another.

So the Bush Cabal did what they usually do when the polling shows that the people see things are really going south -- they sent Secretary of State Colin Powell out in an attempt at damage control. He showed up on CBS, NBC and FOX.

We channel-surfed this Sunday, but only focused on one program, This Week, due to the crazy scheduling on the local channels near Washington.

On This Week, Powell had to address the instability of Iraq, beginning by predictably exaggerating the size of the coalition in Iraq and trying his best to say that Iraq is on track to sovereignty.

It was all downhill from there.

First, Powell was forced to indirectly admit the failure of the Bush Boy to get NATO to help in Iraq, in effect saying "they just don't have troops laying around." (Well, that was pretty much the situation before NATO interceded in other conflicts -- why don't you point THAT out, Mister America's Promise?)

Powell tried to deflect one questions about Abu Ghraib -- the debate over whether to demolish it or leave the decision to Iraqis (we would get an Iraqi answer not much later in the broadcast) -- but had to address the question of whether the Red Cross should come in and investigate. Powell in effect said no, using the lame excuse of Congress already investigating. Steph returned to the scandal a couple questions later, citing memos that claim Bush can authorize torture, to which Powell replied with the boilerplate We-abide-by-treaties, I-haven't read-the-memos sidestep. Steph asked about an appendix to the memo by State that disagreed with DoJ on torture, and Powell again feigned ignorance before describing at length how insidious our "enemy" is.

Powell also in effect said that the situation in Saudi Arabia is indeed too dangerous for Americans, citing the State Department advisory to all nonessential American citizens to make a hasty exit.

(Yessirree, Bush's war on "tairism" is a resounding success... um... well... okay, so it's time to cut and run. It's amazing that Powell did not try to throw a monkey wrench in Steph's linking of the Abu Ghraib torture scandal to attacks on Americans.)

Steph also brought up the State Department report on terrorism in 2003 which had to be "revised" -- and mentioned the little-known fact that two Princeton scholars debunked the original claim that there had been the least international terrorism in three decades in 2003, a claim that was all too easily debunked. (Can't wait to see what happens to those last few months of "terrific" employment numbers -- that is, if they do receive the same amount of scrutiny.) "We are analyzing [and] trying to determine" how such a mistake could be made, said Powell. (Here's a hint, Colin -- see if the "intelligence" on terror strikes got filtered through the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans.) Powell did seem miffed about the matter -- but seemed to try to blame "intelligence" (translation: "It's Tenet's fault! Yeah, that's the ticket!") and explained that there was a "new" methodology for tabulating the terror totals (translation: another Team Bush formula to yield rosy results no matter how catastrophically awful reality is), while denying that for political reasons someone "cooked the books; errors crept in."

(Yep. "Mistakes were made." Sound familiar? A little, well, Nixonian? Errors sure crept in -- into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue N.W. with help from a politicized Supreme Court.)

At least Colin Powell has dropped that talking point about the media "ignoring all the good news coming out of Iraq." One would think he would have at least tried it once given the growing traction of the Abu Ghraib torture scandal -- and especially since Steph failed to mention that more photos of torture, this time with attack dogs, emerged over the weekend. This dumping of the "Hey, it's getting so much better!" line was a very telling omission from the Official Karl Rove Script ®.

Steph's brief interview with Iraq's new president Iraqi President Ghazi al-Yawar focused at first on the "what next" nuts and bolts of sovereignty. After Yawar said he wants the US to be perceived as a liberator (speaking of the Official Karl Rove Script ®), Steph asked in effect if there was a quid-pro-quo in the matter of Moqtada al-Sadr calling for cooperation with the new Iraqi government in exchange for not arresting him; Yawar said he is "wanted for an investigation" and is essentially still charged with murder (translation: we'll sweep it under the rug and al-Sadr will be a good poodle -- if we're lucky). Steph suggested that the interim constitution would only hold until January, bringing up the objections of Ayatollah al-Sistani; Yawar praised Sistani as "very wise" but said "democracy has to prevail" as part of the "Iraqi nationality."

(Huh? WHAT nationality? Iraq is an artificial "nation," a Yugoslavia on the Tigris. We fully expect sectarian and ethnic violence to continue for years given the extent of the Bush Misadministration's miserable failure to bring peace and stability to the nation.)

Steph said that Sistani, like Khomeini, may "come in as a Democrat" but become a dictator. Yawar again praised Sistani's "wisdom" while denying Sistani has theocratic designs on Iraq. (Right, and Bush has no theocratic designs on the United States. You can run it up the flagpole, but it ain't gonna fly.)

Will Abu Ghraib be destroyed? No, it is a symbol of Saddam's atrocities -- if we demolish Abu Ghraib, we have to demolish every one of Saddam's buildings. (So much for Powell's answer.)

Will you run for the permanent presidency? Yawar said he'll do whatever is needed to "save" Iraq. (Sounds like a big "yes" to us. Looks like Yawar is a full-fledged master of the "non-answer answer" -- a career politician if we've ever seen one.)

We blew off a completely content-free spin session between former Gore campaign boss Donna Brazile and former Cheney moll Mary "Lookin' Old Lately" Matalin. Reagan, Reagan, Reagan -- yawn.

While doing a little more channel-surfing, we decided to skip CBS' Deface the Nation due to the guest presence of one Reverend James Dobson. He's the Chair-ayatollah at of Focus on Beating Your Children... um, Focus on the Family. Dobson almost makes Pat Robertson look and sound palatable by comparison -- knowledgeable viewers know enough to expect a spew of intolerance, hatred, complete disrespect for diversity and critical thinking, and avoidance of his Taliban-Christian "advocacy group's" endorsement of child abuse whenever Dobson turns up like a bad penny in the collection basket on the cable news and Sunday political chat circuit.

And, naturally, CBS failed to at least attempt to balance his extremism with another guest. Is it too much to ask, say, Rev. Barry Lynn of PFAW to show? It's not as if the bookers have sufficient courage to put the insufferable Dobson up against, say, an avowed and articulate atheist like, say, the brilliant Paul Kurtz, or for that matter even the equally insufferable Chris Hitchens, no friend of chauvinistic, politically-tainted Christianity. Dobson v. Hitchens is a debate that would be well worth a watch -- but we're not holding our breath.

We did eventually catch a good portion of Tim Russert's interview with Afghanistan's President Hamed Karzai on a west coast NBC affiliate via satellite TV. Russert spent a good deal of time on the issue of the exploding opium and heroin trade emanating from Afghanistan -- and Karzai, in a move we were delighted to see, admitted that the export of heroin and raw opium and the possible institutional criminalization of every level and department of the Afghan government is a credible possibility for the near future. And the money from heroin is funding a terrorist campaign of violence and murder against the US, its allies, and opponents of extremist proto-Islamic fundamentalists.

(Translation: We failed to finish the job in Afghanistan. The Taliban are still in charge of sections of the country. And when you start hearing headlines about the continued uptick in global terrorism targeting Americans worldwide along with stories about an increase in heroin addiction in the US, Europe and Asia, don't think the two stories are not related.)

For once, hats off to Russert for what was a grim, gritty and honest segment -- one which did not cast our "war on terror" in anything approaching a winning light.