We thought the roundtable on Meet the Press today was more interesting than ususal. It consisted of William Safire, Robert Novak, Al Hunt, and David "the dean" Broder. We consider Safire and Novak totally unreliable, Hunt reasonable, and that Broder has yet to recognize the insanity of Bush's fiscal and foreign policy. But Broder may be waking up to the facts. Here, are some excerpts of interest: (emphasis added)
MR. DAVID BRODER: What's going on is that the CIA, which is professional, realizes now that its reputation is on the line for reasons that it is not able to control. Whatever the quality of the intelligence, it's pretty clear now that the interpretation that was given to the public by the Bush administration was at the far edge of what was plausible in terms of the intelligence information that came to the White House and to the State Department and to the Pentagon. Tenet is in an difficult position. He cannot repudiate the president that he serves, but he also has to try to protect the reputation of his own agency, which in my view has been misused by this administration.
MR. RUSSERT: Misused? Politicized?
MR. BRODER: I think so. MR. HUNT: Well, there's a lot at stake here, Tim, and I'm not sure they aren't going to find weapons. ... if we don't find them, if we don't find sufficient numbers to justify the clear and present danger that was depicted by the president and other top officials, then I think it's a tremendous blow to American credibility. MR. NOVAK: Oh, several of the people who are hard-liners in the administration, when the war was still going on inside Iraq, said it was absolutely essential, that we were going to be hugely embarrassed, if they didn't find weapons of mass destruction. So this is a tremendous problem for the Iraqi hawks. You know, however, after the attack on Afghanistan, I wrote a column for the next day, the next Monday, and I talked to a lot of people in the administration who wanted to say, "The next step is Iraq. We have to hit Iraq." Nobody mentioned weapons of mass destruction. They mentioned the need for a regime change, the brutality, the security of Israel, the general posture of the Middle East.
MR. SAFIRE: ... the three bases for going in [to Iraq are]: the criminal behavior and the destruction of human rights by an evil leader; the ties to terrorism, which we haven't talked about, but I still think we'll see them; and the weapons of mass destruction. ... We've seen two mobile biological germ warfare labs that have been found. And what you're going to see is every time we find something, everybody's going to jump on it and say, "Well, we manufactured it," or, "It doesn't really do that thing," or, "It has dual use." And there'll be an attempt by the people who didn't think we should go into this war in the first place to derogate it. MR. RUSSERT: Well, on January 24th, the president's State of the Union message, he said that "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently bought significant quantities of uranium from Africa," and that now has been proven not to be accurate, that the documents were forged. How does that find its way into a presidential speech?
MR. SAFIRE: That was stupid, and somebody goofed. But that doesn't derogate the whole thing.
MR. RUSSERT: Bob Novak, Albert Hunt, the president said in Poland yesterday that we have found weapons of mass destruction.
MR. NOVAK: Well, he's talking about those two chemical-biological warfare things. I don't think that really - I don't think that really makes the case. He obviously feels a credibility problem here. ... Now, obviously [Saddam] did not have weapons of mass destruction ready for use or he would have used them. Nobody ever thought he had nuclear arms, but he didn't have chemical and biological warfare. That's a real problem for this country, in my opinion. (Videotape, May 28, 2003): MR. CLINTON: When practical people find themselves in a hole, they stop digging. When ideological people find themselves in a hole, they ask for a bigger shovel. The design and scope of the 2003 tax cut is the bigger shovel. And the accounting gimmicks with which it was passed to look like $350 billion would have made the accountant for Enron blush. It is, in fact, bigger than originally proposed. Do you really think all this stuff's just going to go away in two or three years? (End videotape)
MR. RUSSERT: Mr. Broder.
MR. BRODER: Well, he's right about that, and the administration would confirm that. They don't want to let these tax cuts phase out. They will seek very quickly to make them permanent so the bill will go up and the deficit will go up
