But the country should be in a giving mood for Ted Koppel and Tom Brokaw. They should give these guys shit for the rest of their television broadcast careers (the time we have to endure since their retirement from their "main gigs") for the pompousity and self-importance they've attached to themselves in this little piece from yesterday's MTP:
MR. RUSSERT: And they were not questioning whether Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
MR. BROKAW: No. No. No.
MR. RUSSERT: That seemed to be a uniformly held belief.
MR. BROKAW: Right. Yeah.
MR. KOPPEL: Nor did the Clinton administration beforehand.
MR. BROKAW: No.
MR. KOPPEL: I mean, the only difference between the Clinton administration and the Bush administration was 9/11.
MR. BROKAW: Right.
MR. KOPPEL: If 9/11 had happened on Bill Clinton's watch, he would have gone into Iraq.
MR. BROKAW: Yeah. Yeah.
This should be Exhibit A as to why the news media has to quit interviewing itself. Why? Because the news media is full of people that are full of themselves, and that bear very little responsibility in their real jobs for what they say. How could Ted Koppel presume to know what would have happened if Clinton was President during 9/11? Does he have any idea what a Republican Congress may have done to Clinton after such attack? Does Tom Brokaw just say yeah, right, after any particular nonsense spouted by Koppel? Is Russert afraid of Koppel's hair? No challenge of this garbage? Perhaps Koppel and Brokaw would have invaded Iraq, perhaps the two of them would have shown the same kind of diligence to detail that George W. Bush did, the same kind of interest in what the U.N was saying that Bush displayed, the same kind of diplomatic skills that Bush brought to bear. I thought both of them were smarter than that, especially Brokaw, but apparently I was very wrong.
Fact 1: We don't know what would have happened with Iraq after 9/11 if anyone else was President. Period. That is one major variable to change.
Fact 2: We do know what George W. Bush did.
It's been 4 years since 9/11, and yet we have to keep saying, focus on what happened. Not the possible scenarios. Not the what-ifs and mebbe-bes. WHAT HAPPENED? We still don't have all the facts, so quit playing your parlor games and do some real work.
Hat Tip to Fixer for spotting this. It is a bit shameful that NBC chose to run such a piece of crap programming on Christmas Day. Give Russert the week off because the nation's airwaves need a break of carrying his pungent loads every week.
You may laugh. You may not. We shall see.
That Kopple conversation is priceless. If you follow the logic in R. Clarke's book, you can easily hypothocate the 911 would have been prevented if a more diligent administration been in place, following up on theats, etc.
"Democrats are going to regret it if they don't cheerlead the elections."
"Democrats need tomake nice because we need a stable middle east to secure their oil"
Not a single word about looking for alternatives and they never explained why they didn't use their mindreading powers to call President Clinton with a message to pack it up and back away from the orfice either.
They could have saved this nation from the shame of felatio and they chose not to do it.
One problem is the constant conflation of nuclear and chemical weapons as "WMD".
Clinton may have believed that Saddam had a few chemical weapons and no or little nuclear program. In that case, Clinton would have thought Saddam possessed "WMD," but simultaneously would not have thought Saddam a substantive threat to the US.