Posted on 11/12/2006 4:58:59 AM PST by Alas Babylon!
The Talk Shows
Sunday, November 12th, 2006
Guests to be interviewed today on major television talk shows:
FOX NEWS SUNDAY (Fox Network): Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean; presidential counselor Dan Bartlett.
MEET THE PRESS (NBC): Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn.
FACE THE NATION (CBS): Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev.; White House chief of staff Josh Bolten.
THIS WEEK (ABC): Sens. Joe Biden. D-Del., and Carl Levin, D-Mich.; Bolten.
LATE EDITION (CNN) : Bolten; Pakistani Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz; Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.
That must be related to my "Shoulda', Coulda', Woulda Club"
They're all so much smarter than we morons.
Conservative causes just got trashed. Border enforcement is done...stick a fork in it. The most conservative plan we can hope for is the one GWB backs.
Maybe you don't realize yet that you have to appeal to a MAJORITY of Americans to get anything done politically.
The President and most Republicans are deeply conservative compared to the Democrats. Sorry that wasn't conservative enough for you. The fact that the conservative agenda moved forward steadily apparently wasn't good enough.
For the first four years I defended the President from moonbats. The last two, I have had to defend him from "conservatives". That was the difference this election.
Carl Levin says he wants to begin withdrawal in 4 to 6 months.
Notice he just gives an example of conservative and skips right past any example of liberal.
My pleasure, Morgan.
President Bush defended his agenda, we rejected him and our troops. Turned over the country to crazy appeasers who want us out of Iraq so they can buy universal health care and free college for all.
Evidently Sandy Burglar and William Jefferson are republicans, who knew!
When they venture an opinion we should still challenge the premise of those opinions when we think that they're wrong. We also need to point out how holding biased opinions is likely to distort their straight reporting, or at least give a reasonable person the impression that their reporting is biased.
When they state a "fact" that is flat out wrong we need to call them on it. Every damn time.
When they ask a question that contains a prejudiced assumption (e.g. "warrant less domestic wiretaps") we need to call them on it.
As important, when "our own" guys and gals concede those types of points (usually because they've got another point they care more about) we need to call them on it, too. I love Newt Gingrich, but I want to pick him up and shake him almost every time he's on one of these shows because he does that consistently. He'll let Colmes or Russert or one of the clearly biased DBM questioners get away with some horrible slander in their question so that he can rush on to his "brilliant point." No more. We need to challenge all of them all the time.
One of the favorite techniques of the left is to continue to use false terms to define an issue their way. Our side has a bad habit of only challenging them on it the first hundred or thousand times they do it then getting tired of the effort. We need to cut them off mid-sentance if necessary and argue that point and nothing else each and every time. Don't let them finish their biased question without challenging the biased premise. If we let them establish something like "warrant less domestic wiretaps" as the premise of a question then we've already lost the argument. It's NOT domestic wiretaps. It's international communications with our enemy in time of war, which we've always had and still have the right, in fact the duty, to intercept, and no judge has any constitutional basis for interfering.
To accomplish that we have to get to our side and convince them that it's important to challenge them every time. Tony Snow, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld have been the only ones in this administration to consistently do this and now Rummy is on his way out. The media didn't like him specifically because he caught them and corrected them when they tried this on him and he was effective at it.
Of course, even if our folks do this, the DBM gets to edit the tape or selectively pull quotes and present only the things they wanted us to see. That's where web based clips and transcripts can come in handy. Often more complete versions of things like press conferences or congressional hearings will offer up a different version of events than what the DBM presents. Yet another area for us to develop skills and exercise our oversight responsibilities.
I'll start looking for contact information for the quests and adding it to my preview thread, as well. We should be in a position to comment on their work as well as the DBMs. As importantly we should be able to send them info before they do these shows to give them the ammunition they need to get it right.
The reason you don't see them is the same reason we hardly ever see Jeff Sessions or Jim Inhofe on TV....they aren't invited. Why would you think that the media would be interested in letting someone who is accomplishing something on TV?
I know that we have had cabinet secretaries occasionally appearing here and it gets covered locally, but as far as the national media, we aren't going to get a break.
Interesting wording - it could refer to the election results, or the behavior that led to the election results. And, I did support the President prior to the election. I cannot support his actions concerning Mr. Rumsfeld, and if I had known about this little deal before the election, I would have criticized then too.
LIEberman has flip flopped more time in his career than even Jon Carry.
He was conservative on social issues until he was the Veep candidate. Before that he stood on the senate floor and read a statement against slick willie, only to end the speech with an endorsement of slick willie.
LIEberman was an orthodox jew until he became an observant jew. Campaigned on Saturdays this time too.
He'll no more caucus with the repubs than the man in the moon.
God bless you! That was one thing about which I really disagreed with Rush and other commentators, when they kept saying, "We only have ourselves to blame." That's true to a degree, but I think it's also like trying to roll a boulder uphill. No matter what "we" do, the deck is stacked for the opposition in a very big way because of media bias. Fortunately, that is slowly changing. I can only hope it changes quickly enough to save disaster.
Had the major news outlets reported in a balanced way about the war, the economy, and political corruption, many people would have voted much differently.
AB, I suggested the very same thing as post one; In addition, thought we should have teams by states/counties/districts with dossiers of possible candidates, the incumbent, their financials, voting records, where they speak, boards they sit on and who's in their pockets... things that could come up for our guys (just in case), and previous misreportings/rumors debunked before they come to the table (obviously, if true... that's different). Kudos, i'm in.
U.S. must prove it's a staying power
Mark Steyn
On the radio a couple of weeks ago, Hugh Hewitt suggested to me the terrorists might try to pull a Spain on the U.S. elections. You'll recall (though evidently many Americans don't) that in 2004 hundreds of commuters were slaughtered in multiple train bombings in Madrid. The Spaniards responded with a huge street demonstration of supposed solidarity with the dead, all teary passivity and signs saying "Basta!" -- "Enough!" By which they meant not "enough!" of these murderers but "enough!" of the government of Prime Minister Aznar, and of Bush and Blair, and troops in Iraq. A couple of days later, they voted in a socialist government, which immediately withdrew Spanish forces from the Middle East. A profitable couple of hours' work for the jihad.
I said to Hugh I didn't think that would happen this time round. The enemy aren't a bunch of simpleton Pushtun yakherds, but relatively sophisticated at least in their understanding of us. We're all infidels, but not all infidels crack the same way. If they'd done a Spain -- blown up a bunch of subway cars in New York or vaporized the Empire State Building -- they'd have re-awoken the primal anger of September 2001. With another mound of corpses piled sky-high, the electorate would have stampeded into the Republican column and demanded the U.S. fly somewhere and bomb someone.
The jihad crowd know that. So instead they employed a craftier strategy. Their view of America is roughly that of the British historian Niall Ferguson -- that the Great Satan is the first superpower with ADHD. They reasoned that if you could subject Americans to the drip-drip-drip of remorseless water torture in the deserts of Mesopotamia -- a couple of deaths here, a market bombing there, cars burning, smoke over the city on the evening news, day after day after day, and ratcheted up a notch or two for the weeks before the election -- you could grind down enough of the electorate and persuade them to vote like Spaniards, without even realizing it. And it worked. You can rationalize what happened on Tuesday in the context of previous sixth-year elections -- 1986, 1958, 1938, yada yada -- but that's not how it was seen around the world, either in the chancelleries of Europe, where they're dancing conga lines, or in the caves of the Hindu Kush, where they would also be dancing conga lines if Mullah Omar hadn't made it a beheading offense. And, as if to confirm that Tuesday wasn't merely 1986 or 1938, the president responded to the results by firing the Cabinet officer most closely identified with the prosecution of the war and replacing him with a man associated with James Baker, Brent Scowcroft and the other "stability" fetishists of the unreal realpolitik crowd.
Whether or not Rumsfeld should have been tossed overboard long ago, he certainly shouldn't have been tossed on Wednesday morning. For one thing, it's a startlingly brazen confirmation of the politicization of the war, and a particularly unworthy one: It's difficult to conceive of any more public diminution of a noble cause than to make its leadership contingent on Lincoln Chafee's Senate seat. The president's firing of Rumsfeld was small and graceless.
Still, we are all Spaniards now. The incoming speaker says Iraq is not a war to be won but a problem to be solved. The incoming defense secretary belongs to a commission charged with doing just that. A nostalgic boomer columnist in the Boston Globe argues that honor requires the United States to "accept defeat," as it did in Vietnam. Didn't work out so swell for the natives, but to hell with them.
What does it mean when the world's hyperpower, responsible for 40 percent of the planet's military spending, decides that it cannot withstand a guerrilla war with historically low casualties against a ragbag of local insurgents and imported terrorists? You can call it "redeployment" or "exit strategy" or "peace with honor" but, by the time it's announced on al-Jazeera, you can pretty much bet that whatever official euphemism was agreed on back in Washington will have been lost in translation. Likewise, when it's announced on "Good Morning Pyongyang" and the Khartoum Network and, come to that, the BBC.
For the rest of the world, the Iraq war isn't about Iraq; it's about America, and American will. I'm told that deep in the bowels of the Pentagon there are strategists wargaming for the big showdown with China circa 2030/2040. Well, it's steady work, I guess. But, as things stand, by the time China's powerful enough to challenge the United States it won't need to. Meanwhile, the guys who are challenging us right now -- in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, North Korea and elsewhere -- are regarded by the American electorate like a reality show we're bored with. Sorry, we don't want to stick around to see if we win; we'd rather vote ourselves off the island.
Two weeks ago, you may remember, I reported on a meeting with the president, in which I'd asked him the following: "You say you need to be on the offense all the time and stay on the offense. Isn't the problem that the American people were solidly behind this when you went in and you toppled the Taliban, when you go in and you topple Saddam. But when it just seems to be a kind of thankless semi-colonial policing defensive operation with no end . . . I mean, where is the offense in this?"
On Tuesday, the national security vote evaporated, and, without it, what's left for the GOP? Congressional Republicans wound up running on the worst of all worlds -- big bloated porked-up entitlements-a-go-go government at home and a fainthearted tentative policing operation abroad. As it happens, my new book argues for the opposite: small lean efficient government at home and muscular assertiveness abroad. It does a superb job, if I do say so myself, of connecting war and foreign policy with the domestic issues. Of course, it doesn't have to be that superb if the GOP's incoherent inversion is the only alternative on offer.
As it is, we're in a very dark place right now. It has been a long time since America unambiguously won a war, and to choose to lose Iraq would be an act of such parochial self-indulgence that the American moment would not endure, and would not deserve to. Europe is becoming semi-Muslim, Third World basket-case states are going nuclear, and, for all that 40 percent of planetary military spending, America can't muster the will to take on pipsqueak enemies. We think we can just call off the game early, and go back home and watch TV.
It doesn't work like that. Whatever it started out as, Iraq is a test of American seriousness. And, if the Great Satan can't win in Vietnam or Iraq, where can it win? That's how China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, Venezuela and a whole lot of others look at it. "These Colors Don't Run" is a fine T-shirt slogan, but in reality these colors have spent 40 years running from the jungles of Southeast Asia, the helicopters in the Persian desert, the streets of Mogadishu. ... To add the sands of Mesopotamia to the list will be an act of weakness from which America will never recover.
http://www.suntimes.com/news/steyn/132340,CST-EDT-steyn12.article
Bush was the first president to spend federal money on embryonic stem cell research. I don't know why the Reps didn't mention that fact more rather than being so defensive. Private research is not banned. It is all about who funds it, not whether the research will be conducted.
Doesn't an Arab sheik also own part of the parent company of FNC?
It's as if they all decided walking the 30 miles to work... beat driving in. If it wasn't so horrific... it'd be hilarious.
Each of these Democrats has to be held accountable to voters in two years. IF they do not vote as they claimed they would, that information needs to be put out there over and over.
Wonder if MRC would allow us to forward selected articles from their website.
With a warning to people with high blood pressure, oF course.
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