Bob Schieffer Remarks about Petraeus Report
NOT a good omen for the administration. Actually, Schieffer’s comments echo the comments of yours truly on TMV.
I’ve long admired Schieffer. I think CBS made a hideous mistake years ago when they got bogged down in deciding between Dan Rather and Roger Mudd and went with Rather (Mudd fled to PBS) and virtually exiled Walter Cronkite. Schieffer is in the Cronkite/Murrow mold.
People pooh-poohed the impact he’d have when Rather’s retirement was sped up and Schieffer replaced him as a caretaker. He was called too old by many — but the newscast’s ratings went up. And once he left and was replaced by Katie Couric, the ratings went down.
His comments are not quite the same as Cronkite turning against the Vietnam War — but it underscores the fact that many independent thinking Americans who don’t automatically defend or blast the administration notice how the administration has changed the announced form of the Petraeus report. His comments underscore the administration’s credibility which inspires the same confidence as a sub prime mortgage:
4 Responses to “Bob Schieffer Remarks about Petraeus Report”
I like Schieffer too but this time he’s mistaken about who is ‘dragging him down the rabbit trail.’
Joe, several commenters pointed out in another post you wrote about the Petraeus report that it was the law passed by the Democratic majority Congress that specified that the president would write the report based on input from Petraeus. Now, the Dem congressmen are feeding the media the line that Bush is changing the rules of the game, even though the rules (which they wrote) always were for him to write the report.
I don’t know the details about what was proposed regarding open or closed sessions before Congress, so I can’t comment on whether there’s anything too that (it seems to me that this might be getting blown out of proportion too, since military reports would tend to have some classified info so that it would make sense that some of the info would have to be presented in a closed session).
But on the authorship of the report, it’s pure Democratic spin to say that there’s been a bait and switch. I’d have to assume that some in the media know that and are going along with it; others are quite possibly just buying it because it fits the way they see that this administration has operated and they haven’t bothered to check the facts.
C Stanley – While you are correct about the language Congress passed, Bush has repeatedly stated this is the Patreaus report. He has used Patreaus’ name literally a hundred times to imply that an objective military appraisal would be delivered in this report. Patreaus promised at his confirmation hearing that his report would be based on METRICS. This bought Bush time with Congress and the American people to support the surge thru 9/15.
Now we learn that only some “thoughts” of Patreaus will be inluded. Do you really believe the WH will produce an objective report full of facts and figures weighed against any metrics?
Of course Bush wants to rely on the Petraeus brand since his is tarnished. That doesn’t excuse the blatant spin and ‘gotchaism’ of the Dems in expressing righteous indignation over “new conditions” when they know very well that the conditions about the report are exactly according to the requirements that they laid out.
When Bush began calling it the Petraeus report, if the Dems had said, “you can call it that all you want, and we respect what Petraeus has to say, but if you cherry pick his assessments and polish over the negatives, we will call BS”, then that would have been perfectly appropriate.
Instead what has transpired is intially some attempts to tarnish Petraeus’ reputation, but then when that didn’t stick the shift was to point out that Bush is writing the report instead of Petraeus (which would be fine if it were just pointed out, not lied about by insinuating that this was a recent decision by Bush contrary to the wishes of Congress, because that part isn’t true). When you put all of this together with guys like Clyburn saying that “it will be a real big problem for us” if the Sept report shows progress, it’s apparent that the Democrats in Congress are more than a bit nervous that the surge isn’t proving to the unmitigated disaster that their base thought it would be. Which means that the Blue Dogs (and the GOP who were leaning as far away from Bush as they could) are not likely to join in the chants of “bring em home NOW” in Sept, and the Democratic leadership is going to be faced with a dilemma of how to placate the antiwar base without losing face.
Ok CStan, I’ll give you that part about Bush having to write the report and that part being played up by the Dems. But what about the closed door part of it? Closed doors, I don’t know who makes them, but they’ve been doing a booming business since Bush took office.