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Addict
Location: Cottage Grove, Wisconsin
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I feel bad for his family.
That's all.
Russert was the consumate infotainment professional. As for host's assessment, the only thing i disagree with is the idea that he was taking the spot of an I.F. Stone. Someone who asked tougher questions of the powerful -- and not just easy marks like Duke -- would not have been in his position.
He was one of the many folks in the press that made the Iraq debacle possible. Take this interview with Cheney, who's spouting his usual 9.11 bullshit. "Tough" Tim Russert lets it slide:
Quote:
VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, I have great affection for Brent. We’ve been friends for a long time. He is occasionally wrong, and this is one of those occasions.
I think it’s important—I don’t want to underestimate the extent of which there are differences here between the United States and our allies on these issues, but it helps to understand that, Tim, I think if we backoff and try to put this in historical perspective. I do think that 9/11 is maybe a historic watershed, that the world is fundamentally different on the front side of that than it was on the backside, on the 21st century side, if you will, than it was on the 20th century side, that the United States and the president have been forced to come to grips with issues that are allies to date have not yet had to come to grips with, that the problem, once you look at 9/11—and, again, think back to the past—we had certain strategies and policies and institutions that were built to deal with the conflicts of the 20th century. They may not be the right strategies and policies and institutions to deal with the kind of threat we face now from a nuclear armed al-Qaeda organization, for example, should that development, and we have to find new ways to deal with those threats.
We’ve been forced, partly because we were hit on 9/11, to come to grips with that very real possibility that the next attack could involve far deadlier weapons than anything the world had ever seen. And then it won’t come from a major state such as would have been true during the Cold War, if the Soviet Union had ever launched at the United States. It will come from a handful of terrorists on jihad, committed to die, and then the effort to kill millions of Americans. The rest of the world hasn’t really had to come to grips with that yet. They’re still, I think, thinking very much in terms of the last century, if you will, in terms of policies and strategies and institutions, and part of the difficulty we’re faced with here is we do have, I think, a different perception of the world today, and what’s going to be required to secure the United States, than they do. And that, in part, accounts for the current debate and difference of perception, if you will, between Americans and Europeans.
There are other things at work here, too. Clearly, the demise of the Soviet Union. That means that a consensus that existed with respect to what the major threats are disappeared with the end of the Cold War. I think the Europeans tend to look at what they’ve accomplished within Europe, which is truly remarkable—the integration of Europe, the increasing reduction in the significance of national boundaries, political and economic coming together of those systems, finding ways peacefully to deal with their differences so they didn’t repeat what happened in the first half of the 20th century when two world wars started in Europe, and they tend to think that the world operates the way Europe does. We look at that, and I think we have to give them enormous credit for what they’ve accomplished, but it’s also true that they accomplished it in part because we provided them the security umbrella for the last 50 years. It was U.S. military capability that held the Soviet Union in check, that formed the backbone for NATO.
And, now, as we go forward and look at the threat of rogue states and terrorists equipped with deadly weapons in the future, the only nation that really has the capability to deal effectively with those threats is the United States. The Brits have got some capability, and they’re great allies, and we badly want them on board in any venture we undertake, but the fact of the matter is for most of the others who are engaged in this debate, they don’t have the capability to do anything about it anyway.
The suggestion that somehow the war on terror has suffered as a result of the differences over Iraq I don’t think is valid. I think what we found is that the cooperation and the intelligence area and the law enforcement area, financial area has been enormously successful, continues to be effective and we’ve seen it in the arrest in recent weeks of very significant figures in the al-Qaeda organization, including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed just a short time ago.
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Here's Russert's next, hard-hitting question. Mr. Tough lets the bullshit flow unchecked:
Quote:
MR. RUSSERT: There is a perception, however, if you read any of the papers in Europe and around the world, the constant description of the president as a cowboy, that he wants to go it alone, that the president and you and the administration that was perceived as extremely confident on foreign policy has been stumbling and hasn’t reached out and nurtured alliances, that if you mention the president’s name-a friend of mine wrote me a letter and said, “It’s like a blast furnace. They just respond, saying, ‘He just wants to lead the world into war.’” Every other German says that in the poll. Forty-five percent of Brits
say that President Bush is a higher risk to world peace than Saddam Hussein. How did we get to this point? And is the competence of the foreign policy of the Bush administration being seriously questioned?
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Yes, he forces Cheney to defend some point, and in that sense, he's tough, but what he asks is irrelevant to Cheney's main assertion. Ol' Dick will miss him, i'm sure. |