Politics Ramble - www.politicsramble.com/ Politics Has Many Proverbial Forks In The Road

You'll pardon me if I don't jump on the pyre the media is building for Tim Russert, who died of a heart attack June 13. You'd never know it from the keening all over television, but as Dick Cheney's press aide testified during the Scooter Libby trial, Russert's show was the place the Bushies loved the most for "getting their message out." Especially during the homicidal and suicidal Iraq war. And especially for the Vice President, who was architect of the Administration's foreign policy.

In fact, the Russert Test was exactly backwards. The better our leaders performed on Meet the Press, the worse their foreign policy seemed to be. Tough: tough. It sounds the same, right? But it's not the same. The political leaders who did the best answering Tim Russert's questions in the last seven years--Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and Colin Powell--are the authors of the most disastrous American foreign policy since the Vietnam War, and maybe since 1776.

The Russert Test was a disaster because it rewarded people willing to lie unabashedly on TV. They lied because they could not truthfully defend their positions. But Russert's famed "gotcha" research couldn't catch them. Much has been said this eulogizing week about Russert's hard-working ways assembling the material in advance of the show. Old metal. When someone told a new lie on Meet the Press, such as when Dick Cheney flat-out denied he had ever said that intelligence confirmed the Al Qaeda/Iraq link, Meet the Press had no procedure for producing the contrary evidence. This would hardly have been difficult, given Google, an earpiece and a producer to do instant research. As it happened, NBC had the rebuttal to Cheney's lies in its own archives, but it remained for The Daily Show to do the research.

As the liberals sense a coming resurrection, they have begun to shine a light on the corrupt, decade-long conservative attack on Social Security, under the cloak of fiscal responsibility. Social Security, practically the last vestige of the New Deal left, is not going bankrupt any more than Saddam Hussein was about to go nuclear. But by far the loudest journalistic voice for this conservative attack on Social Security was Tim Russert. In this program from 2000, he manages to at once beat the drum for repealing Social Security and also use the sticks (again) on the Democratic candidate, Al Gore:
RUSSERT: If--the facts are simple: When Social Security began, Franklin Roosevelt, genius, he--the life expectancy at that point was 63. He made eligibility for Social Security 65...It was a--was a very popular program. There were 45 workers for every retiree and life expectancy was exactly that age. Now we're approaching two workers for every retiree. Life expectancy is 78 going to 85. You're going to have 80 million people on Social Security and Medicare for about a fourth of their life, for three to 20 years. Everyone knows that, and yet when you present it to Al Gore, he'll say, "No problem. I'll take the surplus and it'll pay for it." Even his own Secretary Treasury written volumes of reports--trustees reports, will say, "No, it doesn't work that way." Everyone my age is checking their will (and their CAT scan insurance), and no one wishes a father and husband to drop dead at 58. But for many of us ordinary citizens, Tim Russert was a powerful man who mostly did harm in every way we can think of. So if it's all right with you, I think I'll turn the TV off now.