Slow Joe Biden amd Talkin' Ted Koppel, Con Men
by Hugh Hewitt
November 26, 2005 05:36 AM PST
Slow Joe has an op-ed in the Washington Post today, continuing his decades=long campaign to be thought other than Delaware's luckiest man.
But with Niel Kinnock replaced by Tony Blair, Slow Joe is left to his own devices, and that's always dangerous as just about any tape of unreahersed Joe shows us.
The best bit of Matchstick Man in today's piece is this:
Recently, 79 Democratic and Republican senators told President Bush we need a detailed, public plan for Iraq, with specific goals and a timetable for achieving each one.
This is of course the refernce to the Senate vote on November 15, which Senator Warner cooked up and which was widely understood by most observors to be a rebuke to the president's Iraq policy --a disastrous bit of maneuvering by the Senate majority which probably ruined Bill Frist's presidential ambition.
But no matter how ill-conceived the November 15 gambit was, it did not purport to do what Slow Joe Biden casually asserts it did in today's Post. Biden is lying. No one in the Post's copy room caught it.
The same sort of indulgence was exercised by Charlie Rose when Ted Koppel let fly with this whopper on Monday night (the transcript if from FreeRepublic, as the official one costs money and takes time):
Rose: When you look at politics today, what the president is going through, you believed what about the Iraqi war in terms of the decision to go?
Koppel: I wasn't sure that it was the right time to go. I didn't for a moment doubt that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. I wasn't convinced that even in the hands of Saddam Hussein that those weapons presented a direct challenge to the United States. Based on my own discussions with people who have access to intelligence, I did not believe -- never did, don't believe it now -- that there was a real connection between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. May some al -Qaeda people or known terrorists have made it into Baghdad at some time or another? Sure. They've made it into Damascus and they’ve made it into Amman and they’ve made it into Cairo...
Rose: Riyadh, and a lot of other capitals.
Koppel: ….and we can't expect to go to war against all those countries. So the big question is the weapons of mass destruction, and my feeling was, I could not think of a single reason why Saddam Hussein would be foolish enough to employ any of those weapons against the United States of America.
Rose: Because it would be suicide?
Koppel: It would be suicidal. Might he employ them against the Saudis? Sure. We thought he was going to do that back in 1990 before Desert Storm.
Rose: After Kuwait.
Koppel: After Kuwait. I mean certainly he had shown the capacity to be aggressive against his neighbors. He had indeed used weapons of mass destruction, poison gas, against some of his own people, Kurdish iraqis. But he did that, Charlie, back in 1988, in a place called Halabja. And that was when the Reagan-Bush administration was in power, and frankly, nobody seemed to care back then because he was our S.O.B. He was perceived to be a useful balance against the Iranians and the crazy mullahs. So back then, nobody really cared. So to hear George Bush's son, you know, some 12 years later or -- 13 years later, suddenly cite that as one of the reasons why we had to go to war, I couldn't see that there was any urgency.
There are so many bizarre things in this bit of transcript that a serious interviewer would never have moved on beyond this set-up:
So the "Bush lied-people died" refrain is a canard?
You knew Saddam had no connection to al Qaeda? Based on conversations with intelligence sources? What did they say? How could they know?
Did you say anything on air at the time since you were convinced?
Why didn't you say something at the time?
Even if you believed that at the time, since you didn't say a peep, isn't it, well, disgraceful to posture this way as you go out the door?
Why use the construction "Bush's son?" Do you be refer to "Clinton's wife" when Senator Clinton adopts a policy different from President Clinton's?
"I couldn't see that there was any urgency." Do you think terrorists would use WMD against the United States if they obtained them? If you thought there had been a connection between Saddam and al Qaeda, would that have provided the urgency?
Biden and Koppel are part of a deeply entrenched D.C. elite that have enjoyed a decades-long pass from elite media, an absolution for idiotic statements, and an exemption from hard questions about those statements. One of the reasons that Koppel's show has slowly fallen into irrelevance from which it was rescued only by distasteful explotiatation of the heroes of the GWOT is not the left-wing bias so much as its almost complete avoidance of hard questions and serious conversation about serious things. The same is true for Charlie Rose and Tim Russert and just about every wheezing talking head that used to matter. They don't press the left, really press the left.
If they did, of course, Joe Biden would shatter like the Christmas light ornament hitting the driveway. So would Koppel. So would they all.
So instead we get the pretend interviews and the pretend op-eds, and a growing recognition among most American voters --already a majority in 2004-- that the Democratic Party and its MSM allies can't be trusted to protect the national security because they cannot be trusted to even get through a moderately difficult interview or a 750 word op-ed without inventing realites to fit their positions.
The reason the House action of eight days ago was so warmly received by the GOP base --and so distasteful to the Beltway-- was that it refused to enable this cloistered left. By stripping the rhetoric to its bare essential --immediate withdrawal-- the Democrats and their pals with microphones and keyboards had to factor in clarioty and they ran for cover.
That is truth in action, and that's what the majority of voters want on the war. Look at the poll below. Nearly nine out of ten respondents want the United States Senate to stop enabling the Joe Bidens and the Pat Leahys and the Harry Reids and the Barbara Boxers:
GOP Senate Majority:
Too Collaborative 10311 (88.6%)
Just Right 632 (5.4%)
Too Confrontational 689 (6.0%)
The GOP Senate Majority should take the war as seriously as the voters do.
MSM would also benefit if it demanded of a new generation of anchors the sort of tough questions and editorial policies that reflect neither left nor right but a determination to force con men like Biden and Koppel to actually defend their absurd statements. The questions don't have to be intemperate or discourteous, just determined and informed. And though the hosts might have a few less dinner invites, the subscriptions and ratings would follow.
And, Slow Joe, please, please, please run. |
