Thursday, April 19, 2007
National Public Softballs
by Tom Bozzo
In this morning's interview with Douglas Feith, Visiting Professor and "Distinguished Practitioner in National Security Policy" [*] at Georgetown, Feith laid out a scenario of the U.S. getting a 1-2 punch from Saddam's WMD and connections with terrorists. Inskeep follows up by asking whether that scenario "assumed too much." A real journalist might have mentioned, say, the non-existence of the WMD or the claimed links to Al Qaida. Eventually, Feith raises his voice an octave and asserts "No, there weren't" to the suggestion that analysts differed with the intelligence his office manufactured; after some high-and-fast talking [**], Inskeep obtains an admission that opinions differed as to the degree of threat. Bravo.
Alas, Inskeep didn't ask the bestest question of all: "Tommy Franks once called you the 'f***ing stupidest guy on the face of the earth.' Are you?"
[*] Which surely deserves some institutional award for Violence to the Plain Meaning of Words.
[**] The one time I heard Greg Mankiw on NPR, he was talking really fast in service of proffering an explanation for how Bushist economic policy makes flowers bloom in the Spring or suchlike.
Were this another blog, we might call this "Why oh why don't we have a better press corps (Steve Inskeep Edition)."
In this morning's interview with Douglas Feith, Visiting Professor and "Distinguished Practitioner in National Security Policy" [*] at Georgetown, Feith laid out a scenario of the U.S. getting a 1-2 punch from Saddam's WMD and connections with terrorists. Inskeep follows up by asking whether that scenario "assumed too much." A real journalist might have mentioned, say, the non-existence of the WMD or the claimed links to Al Qaida. Eventually, Feith raises his voice an octave and asserts "No, there weren't" to the suggestion that analysts differed with the intelligence his office manufactured; after some high-and-fast talking [**], Inskeep obtains an admission that opinions differed as to the degree of threat. Bravo.
Alas, Inskeep didn't ask the bestest question of all: "Tommy Franks once called you the 'f***ing stupidest guy on the face of the earth.' Are you?"
[*] Which surely deserves some institutional award for Violence to the Plain Meaning of Words.
[**] The one time I heard Greg Mankiw on NPR, he was talking really fast in service of proffering an explanation for how Bushist economic policy makes flowers bloom in the Spring or suchlike.
Labels: Intellimigence, Iraq, Journamalism
