American Politics Journal

apj.us / correntewire.com presents
Pundit Pap
for August 13, 2006
Terror Terror Terror Fear Fear Fear!
by Corrente's Leah
with APJ's JJ Balzer

April 13, 2006 (correntewire.com / apj.us) -- Ned Lamont's primary win against incumbent senator Joe Lieberman was the top political story of the week -- and it did get plenty of play this Sunday, although it was more or less drowned out by the thwarted London-based airline terror plot and the countdown to an alleged Israel-Hezbollah cease-fire.

Leah got down and dirty with Meet the Press, and I took a quick look at a few of the other shows. Here's what we hope you didn't have to torture yourself with this Sunday...

Meet The Press: David Gregory Gets Serious On Terror
by Leah

Terror alerts, terror threats, terror among us, terror without us, terror around us, terror, terror, terror! Headline from today’s Meet The Press: Terror is a word worn-out from over and inaccurate use; in a word, terror, and all the attached -isms, have become a bore.

The implications, such as they may be, of the arrests in London of a group said to be planning coordinated attacks on multiple airlines on route to the good old USofA was used as the frame for the entire hour.

Secretary of Homeland Security Mike Chertoff provided an amiable stone wall, and NBC's David Gregory (subbing for a vacationing Pumpkinhead Timmeh) brought little energy to the task of chipping away at it. Not that Chertoff wasn’t full of information; he was, but there was nothing new or interesting about his information.

More importantly, supplying information was of less importance than supplying talking points.

An example: Chertoff isn’t concerned with the politics of this event, and thus wouldn’t comment on VP Cheney’s comment quoted by Gregory -- to wit, that Ned Lamont’s win over Senator Joe Lieberman in Connecticut could give encouragement to the Al Qaeda types, whose plans the British so recently broke up; meanwhile, in the same answer, Chertoff wasn’t bashful about pointing out the importance of unity of message going out to the “the terrorists” and the need for bipartisan unity.

Gregory wanted to know what had worked here. The non-political Chertoff managed, during the course of several long answers, NOT to mention good police work, good intelligence from the Muslim community within England, or good follow-through by police working with British security services in strict, successful surveillance of suspected participants, which allowed for the development of first-rate intelligence -- you know, like what we DIDN’T do with so-called trained Al Qaeda operative José Padilla when he returned from Pakistan to Chicago, and we not only picked him up, but Ashcroft made a special point of announcing the arrest.

Instead, Chertoff emphasized the deep relationship between us and the Brits, their trust in us, our ability not to leak; he emphasized that, as if any newspaper would print a leak about an on-going investigation into a specific developing terrorist threat.

Why had the Bush administration redirected half of what had been allotted for research and development of ways to detect liquid explosives to training screeners? "Priorities," said Chertoff. Chertoff thinks we have to know more about who is flying; I don’t know what he meant by that, but I think most Americans would rather have that money spent on detection of the actual chemical threat -- if we could do that, mistakes of interpretation would be less likely, and air travel a good deal less stressful, not to mention the fact that you could bring your eye drops with you onto the plane.

Oh, well.

Next up were former Governor Tom Kean and former Rep. Lee Hamilton, the two Chairmen of the 9/11 Commission, who are out with a new book about what went on behind the scenes.

They also wished not to be political, and managed not to be.

Still, it was clear that both felt “we,” i.e., the Bush administration, is behind where “we” should be in protecting the homeland, this far out from 9/11.

The fact that Al Qaeda was known to be interested in blowing up multiple airlines did come up; Ramzi Yousef was going to try it a decade ago using liquid explosives.

The most important comment came from Hamilton, though it was clear Kean agreed: what this episode tells us is that radicalization of Muslims around the world has accelerated since 9/11. (NOTE: all quotes are my transcript and probably not literally word-for-word correct.)

And we have to understand, I believe, that if you’re really going
to make the American people safe, it’s not just a question of
taking different procedures on airplanes, it is dealing with the
fundamental problem of the radicalization of Muslims in the world
today.

Karl Rove calls that, and will again, wanting to treat terrorists with therapy.

Kean agreed that radicalization has gotten worse; he declined to be critical of the decision to invade Iraq, nor would he offer any thoughts on what is to be done there now. But he did make this statement:

I think because there are a whole bunch of things happening in
the world which has tended to make Muslims dislike the United
States more than they even did before. After 9/11, there was
world sympathy that came to us. Since then, the war in Iraq, our
support Israel, which is constant, and plus, as Lee said, these
people are not getting any better off. I mean, these people still
don’t have jobs, they’re still poor, they still don’t have any
future, they don’t have any hope.

A different take on “root causes” here.

Hamilton made a particularly good point; while not taking a position on Iraq, or on Bush notions of democratizing the Middle East by military means, that good policy has to be based on a realistic awareness that actions have consequences; in Iraq, whatever you think of the policy, what can’t be denied is that our last three years there has increased hostility to this country among Muslims around the world.

It was around here, that Hamilton made the only reference to the situation in Lebanon during the entire hour:

That doesn’t make American foreign policy wrong, it just means
that it has a lot of consequences to it that keep flowing. If you
kill hundreds and hundreds of people in Lebanon, that has
consequences. And the consequences are that you further
radicalize a lot of people. You have to deal with that by doing
the kind of things that Tom suggested, reaching out to the Muslim
world.

As for homeland security, both Kean and Hamilton gave examples of the slowness of response in making us safer; for Kean, no unified watch lists at the airport, which would make screening much easier, of course, and a lack of “puffer” machines, in airports to detect traces of explosives.

To this Hamilton added:

It’s an amazing thing, five years after this event that we’re
still straggling with the whole question of developing detection
devices for all kinds of explosives. Five years after this event.
And the secretary a moment ago spoke about pilot programs. Pilot
programs, five years after the event.

David Gregory was also resolutely resolute about avoiding any discussion that might be called “political,” even passing up an opportunity, when Chertoff emphasized the close coordination that went on with the Brits, to ask Secretary Chertoff about reports, one of them by NBC’s Lisa Myers, that the British had wanted to carry their surveillance on for a few more days before closing in, and that they deferred to Washington’s insistence that the plot be made public when it was.

I guess he wished to keep all discussions of the politics of terror for his final two guests: Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean speaking for Democrats, and GOP Chairman Ken Mehlman for Republicans.

Dean was good, I thought, refusing to let Gregory’s framing of the questions continue to paint Democrats as having been taken over by some radical left liberalism embodied by Ned Lamont.

Again and again, Dean went back to the list of administration failures around the world:
- Iraq
- North Korea
- failure to catch Osama
- Afghanistan
- and its resurgent Taliban.

Dean refused to rough up Lieberman -- which was good, a way of not becoming defensive at the same time that Lieberman’s attempts to link Lamont and the would-be London bombers were excoriated by Dean.

Gregory: Are Democrats open to various points of view about “the war?” Which war wasn’t clear, though Gregory seemed to mean Iraq. Dean was effective in pointing out how thin this accusation was -- Democrats voted for a resolution that has no date certain for leaving Iraq -- and managed to insist that what did Lieberman in with the voters in the primary was his insistence on embracing too closely the Bush administration, at a time when voters want change.
Dean’s best moment came when he pointed out that Lieberman’s statements since his loss in the primary have been photocopies of those by Richard Cheney and Ken Mehlman.

Ken Mehlman was ushered on after Dean, and asked to comment on Dean’s comments. Ken, naturally, was ready.

He disagreed on two points at first; Dean’s saying that Iraq was, in fact, a distraction from the War on Terror, to which Mehlman countered that it is “the terrorists” themselves who say that Iraq is the frontline in their own struggle, i.e., Osama himself says that it is his goal to drive us out of Iraq; guess we’re stuck there forever in that case, or until the Bush administration gets hold of Bin Laden.

The second point upon which Mehlman disagreed with Dean was on Dean’s assertion that Democrats are just as committed to America being strong as are Republicans. Then why, Mehlman wanted to know, did Democrats vote against the Patriot Act -- which they didn’t, of course; it was only later, after some bad practices, often wasteful ones, came to light, wished to alter it. (Hello? David?) Why then, Ken asked, are they against surveillance programs, ones similar to what worked in London? Of course Democrats aren’t, only to the Bush administration’s penchant for ignoring the constitution and FISA laws, and there is no indication that illegal surveillance was the key to last week’s British success. Mehlman: why are Democrats against missile defense, surely a key component in the birth of a new Middle East.

Well, it went on like that.

One thing about these guys: they are all one trick ponies. My suggestion, if you’re interested: take time to look at the transcript of this last segment with Mehlman. He laid out all the talking points -- and, significantly, lies upon which they are based -- that will be used between now and November.

Start writing those letters to the editor now. We can beat these jokers, dammit; just don’t think it’s going to be as easy as it should be, not with “the press” we keep meeting every damn Sunday!

Short Takes from Beltway Media Hell
by JJ Balzer

• Damn those wire services! They beat me to the best example of "this is how it's done" from this Sunday's talk shows, namely this exchange between George Stephanopoulos and Sen. Russ Feingold on ABC This Week concerning the favorite of those filthy hippie insurgent leftist antiwar peacenik... um... er... make that the "silenced majority," the 60% of Americans who now think the Iraq war is a miserable failure, Ned Lamont:

Stephanopoulos: "Senator Lieberman thinks that your approach will
strengthen the terrorists and it's a victory for terrorists.
What's your response?"

Feingold: "Well, I like Joe Lieberman, but I support Ned Lamont.
Because Joe is showing with that regrettable statement that he
doesn't get it. He doesn't get it. The fact is that we were
attacked on 9/11 by Al Qaeda and its affiliates and its
sympathizers, not by Saddam Hussein. And unfortunately Senator
Lieberman has supported the Bush Administration's disastrous
strategic approach of getting us stuck in Iraq instead of
focusing on those who attacked us. I mean, look at the places
that have been attacked: India, Morocco, Turkey, Afghanistan,
Indonesia, Somalia, Spain, Great Britain. What does this have to
do with Iraq? And Senator Lieberman is stuck on that point. Ned
Lamont and I believe that we should refocus on those who attacked
us on 9/11 and not simply try to cover our tracks because this
was such a very poor decision in terms of the overall battle
against the terrorists who attacked us."

Stephanopoulos: "Do you think Senator Lieberman should get out of
the race?"

Feingold: Well, you know, I think that's his own decision. It
would be better for the Democratic Party, I think it would be
better for the people of Connecticut, it would be better for the
country if he did it. Not because he hasn't been a good Senator,
not because he isn't a good man, but this is a critical time. And
we have to change course. We have to focus on those that attacked
us on 9/11 and get away from this very mistaken policy in Iraq.
So it would be helpful if he would do it, but obviously Joe will
have to make that decision for himself.

• ABC's Martha "Ditz" Raddatz was a ditz as she declared that Dems "don't want" to demand withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq because "the lesson from Vietnam ... was you have to support the troops or there's tremendous backlash.". Our jaws hit the ground when Martha let that boner loose, and Media Matters provides the best translation (http://mediamatters.org/items/200608130001):

In other words, supporting the United States' withdrawal from
Iraq -- where, according to the U.S. military, nearly 2,600 U.S.
soldiers have been killed and more than 19,000 have been wounded
-- is not supporting the troops.

Yep, that Martha, a real journalistic genius. Grab the girl a Pee-yew-litzer!

• Over on CBS's Face the Nation, Scott Pelley subbed for Bob "Ol' Uncle Crankypants" Schieffer, where Michael Chertoff said that he knows of no US-based suspects connected with the plot uncovered in Britain. Coming from a guy who bears a sorta-kinda resemblance to Skeletor (the villain from the old "He-Man and the Masters of the Universe" cartoon series), we weren't exactly reassured. He said the very same thing on CNN's Late Edition.

• Leslie "Wolf" Blitzer put a lot of time into talking about the pending Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire over on CNN Late Edition. Trade Minister Isaac Herzog told Blitzer that Israel will keep operating in southern Lebanon to destroy Hezbollah's missiles and infrastructure. (In other words, don't count on a cease-fire that's an actual cease-fire.) By mid-afternoon, I noticed that CNN had put up a "Countdown to Cease-Fire" clock in the lower right corner of the screen. Okay, so it does beat seeing the words "Breaking News!"
every 5 minutes since the whole mess began just over a month ago.

• But by far the best political talk of the weekend was on 60 Minutes. Mike Wallace interviewed Iran's President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Basically, Ahmadinejad blamed all instability and violence in the Middle East on the US and Israel. He did not leave a very good impression -- he came across as snide, arrogant, and evasive, and is clearly not savvy enough to leverage a rare media opportunity to impress viewers in what he still sees as the Great Satan and wasn't sharp enough to conceal.

If you missed it, here's the good news: according to the KCStar blog, C-SPAN is running the entire, unedited interview Monday at 8PM EST. Miss it at your own peril -- this guy is more than a little likely to be Bush Jr's biggest headache for the rest of his term.

Universally acclaimed as boldly shrill members of the reality-based community, the Bloggers of Corrente can be reached off the record, on the Q.T., and very hush hush at their highly fortified headquarters, The Mighty Corrente Building.

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