Mark Steyn on the Hugh Hewitt show yesterday:
HH: What were you doing in D.C. yesterday?
MS: (laughing) I think you know the answer to this. I was in Washington for a couple of days, and I happened to see Secretary Rumsfeld and President Bush, which is a...
HH: You know, I didn't know...were you there with Barone?
MS: Yes.
HH: (Duane,) do we have anyone coming up that we can bump? Mark, can you stick around?
MS: Yeah, I can stick around.
HH: Oh, I didn't know that. I really did not know that until I talked to Barone last night. That had to be a heck of a conversation. I'm coming right back with a report from the Oval Office.
---
HH: Now Mark Steyn, a less polite columnist, with less breeding or English and Canadian heirs, would have found a way to pose with the President, get a shot of him taking your book from you. I don't think you probably managed to get that done.
MS: (laughing) Well, I would have felt bad doing that, but as it happens, I found myself in that situation, where the President did ask me to sign his copy of America Alone.
HH: D'oh...did someone have a camera?
MS: And I don't believe anyone did.
HH: (groans)
MS: And you know, I'm not one of those guys who knows how to photoshop the...he actually is...one of the interesting things, he mentioned on...getting America Alone out of the way for a moment, but he mentioned on I think the George Stephanopoulos show that he was reading Andrew Roberts' History Of The English Speaking People Since 1900, a sort of sequel to Churchill's work. And everyone's very sniffy about the President, and they assume he's just saying that because he wants to look like he's read a book, and he's just a moron. Everybody knows he's just an idiot. And in fact, he said to me, he asked me if I knew Andrew Roberts. And I said oh yeah, sure. I got an e-mail from him this morning. He was very pleased and flattered that you'd mentioned his book. And...
HH: Is this the Andrew Roberts who wrote Salisbury?
MS: Yes, that's right.
HH: Oh, that's a magnificent biography.
MS: Yeah, the biography of the Marquis of Salisbury. And he goes, that is a great book. People need to read that book. And you think you're just having some sort of social chit-chat. My assistant, Tiffany, got a call this morning from an assistant to the President, who said Mark told the President that he had Andrew Roberts' e-mail address. Do you think you could ask Andrew Roberts to get in touch with the Oval Office, because we would like him to stop by when next he's in Washington. The President would like to talk about his book with him. I mean, he is absolutely not the guy, this sort of fratboy idiot that they paint him as. He's a man who is greatly...he's not interested in...you know, when Al Gore says that he's reading Stendhal, The Red And The Black, we think what a pretentious twit.
HH: Yes. But we think that anyway, so...(laughing)
MS: Yeah, yeah. But if he is seriously reading it, he's incredibly pretentious. And if he's just pretending to read it, it's like even more idiotic, because it's not even a cool thing to pretend to read anymore. But the President had actually read this book. And when I mentioned...and he'd remembered that I'd said I just had an e-mail from him, and immediately, they call up a few hours later and want...I mean, I find him impressive in that way. And I know people...it's a 50/50 nation. Nobody's going to change their mind about President Bush now. But this cartoon people have of him is not the man George W. Bush.
HH: Eventually, history and biography will catch up with that. I'm curious as to the dynamic in the room. I know that Krauthammer was there, and Barone and yourself. How did that unfold? That's a lot of verbal firepower in there.
MS: Well, you know, it was clear...and I sort of...I'm not totally...this comes back to the being a foreigner thing again. I was the only foreigner in the room, and so I'm not at ease with...I'm not on top of all the Mr. President and the style thing, because it's slightly different from what I'm used to. So I asked a question rather bruskly at one point, about Americans supporting this war when we're on offense, but not when it just seems like we're hunkered down in a kind of thankless, semi-colonial policing operation. And it sort of fired him up. And it fired him up, and he said we are on offense, and he insisted we're on offense. And it was interesting to me that he...that there was a kind of dynamic in the room, in which Larry Kudlow in particular, who has been disillusioned with the last year or two in Iraq, and the President really firing back, and really being very forceful and laying it out. And I think he came out with some good lines. He came out with some things that gave me great pause for thought, and actually do worry me, one of which I was sort of thinking about on the plane, on the way home. But the fact is, he's thinking 15, 20 years down the line, and John Kerry and Howard Dean and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid aren't.
HH: Now take us over to the SecDef's office, and how did the conversation with Rummy go?
MS: Well, that was with the Secretary and General Pace. And again, it was...the interesting thing to me is...which I find interesting, is clearly, Rummy's moment has passed, in that he was the kind of darling and the pin up three or four years ago. And now, even the right are saying he's a disaster, he's got to go, he's got to resign, he's been there too long, and all the rest of it. And I think, actually, that is completely not what has happened in Iraq. I think what has happened in Iraq is that the Department of Defense, by and large, has done its job, and that it's other agencies that have not stepped up to the plate on this. All kinds of agencies are involved in Iraq. You know, reconstructing Iraqi agriculture is nominally under the responsibility of the Department of Agriculture in the United States. And I think that's the real question. You need something...you can't...and army cannot do everything when it goes into these countries. But the trouble is when you send in the State Department, or the Commerce Department, or the Treasury, they're not very good when you stick them on the ground 8,000 miles away, either. So I do think...I came away from that thinking that the Department of Homeland Security was the wrong bureaucratic monstrosity to create, and in fact, we need a sort of more projected expeditionary kind of global department, that there needs to be some kind of institutional reform, I think, in the way America does things on this front.
HH: Boy, do I agree with that. I think they need an Annapolis for spies to begin with. But let me ask you about the idea...have you read Doris Kearns' A Team Of Rivals?
MS: No, I haven't read that.
HH: Oh, it's a fantastic...it's an amazing book about the dynamic inside of Lincoln's cabinet. It's a political history of the Civil War, and Tim Cook was here yesterday, telling me it's today. It's just like today.
MS: Right.
HH: Was Rumsfeld worn out? Or is he energized?
MS: No, he's not. You know, that was the interesting thing. He's a very playful man in his language. And he has no political ambitions, obviously, and he has been asked by the President not to comment on political matters pertaining to the November election. So in one sense, he's constrained. And in the other, he's kind of liberated. I think he's quite up front about the various problems that are faced in Iraq, but I think he's also quite a realist. And he understands that what's going on is not the whole story. You know, the reality of the situation is that in 12 of Iraq's 17 provinces, life is better there than it has ever been in Iraq's history. There's nothing happening, there's no violence. People are getting on with their lives, and building a new state in freedom. And I think that in itself is an impressive achievement. And if these guys holed up in the Green Zone in Baghdad were in those 12 provinces, you might be getting a different picture in the way life is in Iraq.
HH: I look forward to reading accounts of this, Mark Steyn, when you put them into your column. I'll be checking at www.steynonline.com for that. Thanks for spending extra time, and giving us a look inside the Oval Office and the E-ring.
End of interview. hughhewitt.townhall.com |
