Russert Watch

Hello and welcome to another episode of Meet The Press, where hopefully God will help Tim ask the right questions.

I suppose if Leader Pelosi had plunked onto the desk an official Hookergate plaster cast of Goss's genitalia attained from a rogue CIA groupie, Russert would've been more satisfied.

You'd think Tim would explore these statements -- Yergin mentioned Nigeria, Venezuela, Iraq, Iran, and the fallout from hurricanes. Lotta meat there, no? Yes, well, you know how to Google.

Gasp! This 44-year-old out-of-context snippet of footage MUST mean that Kennedy is a FLIP-FLOPPER! Come now, Tim -- that's reaching, even for you.

I really like what's going on on this panel -- but, that said, this edition of "Meet The Press" is pretty toothless.

It started with the intro: welcoming Kerry as "the man who received 48.3 percent of the popular vote" in 2004. Ding! That would be Senator Kerry, not President Kerry.

Make no mistake, George Allen is Rove's Fisher-Price Man.

The disconnect between reality and the dialog on this morning's Meet the Press was so acute I thought the dog had tuned me in to Mystery Science Theater 3000.

After such an extraordinary week in Iraq, we were in greater need than usual of a guest -- or two -- who actually knew something about Iraq and was able to talk about it in something other than RNC cliches. But today's well-rounded Meet the Press lineup included Republican Senator John Warner, Republican Congressman Peter King and Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Perhaps the phone lines are down on the other side of the political divide. Isn't it this contempt for real knowledge and expertise that got us into this mess in the first place?

To get the full effect of Mary Matalin's cringe-inducing appearance on Meet the Press, you had to see not just what Mary said, but how she said it. She was dripping with contempt and sarcasm, parroting anything said by the other panelists in a teenage sing-song imitation complete with the liberal use of air quotes. Note to the vice president: if you're in a situation in which you feel like you need a little more empathy from the American people, and want them to see you as human, you might want to reconsider handing the job to Mary Matalin. It's hard to believe that the VP's 29-percent approval rating didn't plummet by the time her performance was over.

Today's Meet the Press featured an older male Senator hawking a bottle of pills. And no, these weren't little blue pills, and no, it wasn't Senator Bob Dole. It was another senator from Kansas, Sen. Pat Roberts, who, I kid you not, tried to make a point about the NSA scandal to his fellow panelists by pulling out a bottle of pills and admonishing the group that "everybody ought to take a memory pill." Of course Tim Russert, who lives in the eternal present (going to the past only for meaningless "gotcha" quotes and the future only for meaningless "Are you running for president?" questions), failed to call Roberts on his outright falsehoods.

Meet the Press and the Super Bowl share a common bond: it's all about the game. On the war, John Boehner offered a novel theory of delayed gratification: it may not benefit our generation, but for our kids and theirs, this may be the greatest gift that we give them." Just like that, the Republican majority leader gave up on us getting any benefits -- including, presumably, in terms of increased security -- for an entire generation. And here is Russert's follow-up on this stunning concession from Boehner: "If the situation in Iraq in November of this year is like it is today, will Republicans pay a price at the polls?" Ah, yes, the Republicans' standing at the polls. Is that what the game -- and the war -- is all about, Tim?

Here's some timely advice for Russert: Team Russert needs to do an Oprah and haul back on his show Cheney and Rumsfeld and all the politicians who've lied to him on the set and damaged his credibility and confront them straight out. But there were many missed opportunities Sunday for Oprah-style truth extraction without novocaine in Russert's interview with Bill Frist, including following Frist's answer about the sale of his HVA stock...

This week's Meet the Press so clearly exemplifies what's wrong with the show and with the mainstream/Beltway media culture it represents it should be sent straight to the Smithsonian. Does Tim Russert really think nobody's going to notice that he's having a guest on his "news" show who is making it possible for his son to co-host a national sports radio show before he's even out of college? Or, more likely, does he just not give a damn, because, hey, it's all just one big game... hockey, baseball, football, politics, it's all the same thing, right? READ MORE
News Alert: Don't miss award-winning writer Ann Louise Bardach's profile of Ken Mehlman, delivering scoops and insights on Dick Cheney, Bob Woodward, Grover Norquist, Sam Alito, and Mehlman. Exclusively on HuffPost.

We all know the drill: an administration official leaves and writes a book promising some "bombshell" revelations that he or she couldn't reveal while still on the inside, a few of these explosive revelations are leaked before publication to prime the PR pump, and then a book tour follows, with the author making the talk-show rounds. What made Bremer's appearance on Meet the Press today particularly unuseful is that although Russert challenged Bremer on a few points, he refused to acknowledge the big elephant in the room -- that Bremer's "memoir" is a complete sham.

Newly released court documents add fuel to the speculation that Tim Russert didn't want to testify about his conversations with Scooter Libby because he thought it would land Scooter in hot water. Isn't that sweet? So even after Scooter released Russert from any promise of confidentiality, Mr. Meet the Press had his lawyers petition a judge to let their client take a pass on talking with Pat Fitzgerald -- arguing that doing so would, in the words of the Washington Post, "harm Russert's relationships with other sources." Sources? Like he's some kind of investigative reporter, digging into big stories? Please!

I was almost looking forward to Meet the Press this morning. It's been a big week, after all. The party in charge of the White House, the House, and t...

I realize that a New Year's day "Year in Review" roundtable on Meet the Press is probably devoted to bloviating by design rather than happenstance, but it would've been nice if someone had managed to pick up a newspaper before the cameras started rolling.

Is there anyone more useless than Condi Rice? She was Russert's first guest, and he gave her ten feet of rope to hang herself with. On the eavesdropping front, she actually said, "I am not a lawyer" -- not once, but three times.

Sharing the first segment of Meet the Press with Senator Lindsey Graham was Madeleine Albright. I actually like having guests with no power to do anything about the war in Iraq, or anything else for that matter. But if they are not going to use the freedom that comes with not being in power to say anything useful or original, why bother to book them? But it was in the second segment when the real unreality of the show hit you. This was the roundtable, which featured David Brooks, E.J. Dionne, and Mike Allen who had reported a piece on the inner workings of the Bush administration for this week's Time.

Today's Meet the Press was a pretty dispiriting affair. And not just because it was, well, Meet the Press. The marquee guest was John McCain. Or, should I say, "John McCain." The guy who showed up looked like McCain, but didn't sound like McCain. What made the experience all that much stranger for me is that right after watching the show, I had breakfast with McCain's campaign finance reform partner, Senator Russ Feingold, whose fearless assessment of the reality in Iraq made it even clearer that the Straight Talk Express has gone seriously off the road. And the weirdest part was Russert's refusal to acknowledge any of it. The whole show had a surreal, subdued, almost underwater quality. You got the feeling that McCain knew the stuff coming out of his mouth -- "the president has done a good job" -- was absurd, and you kept waiting for Russert to ask: "But wait a minute, aren't you John McCain? What's happened to you?"

During the roundtable segment on Sunday's Meet the Press, Tim Russert turned to David Broder and Eugene Robinson, both with the Washington Post, and asked them what's going on at the Post in light of the Bob Woodward revelation. To my delight and surprise, Broder and Robinson did not respond like good company men, but spoke of "consternation" and “embarrassment.” It was a great opportunity for Tim to look at the broken conventions regarding confidential sources and the broken trust between the public and the press. But instead, he went right back to the old protect-your- sources playbook. Stunning though it may seem, Russert really believes that the main problem raised by Judy Miller's and Bob Woodward's roles in Plamegate is how does the press repair the damage done between journalists and anonymous sources? Talk about missing the forest for the trees.

Just when the show was on the brink of Something Actually Happening, wham! Over thirty minutes of bird flu. Even within the bird flu topic, Tim managed to miss the most important question. It doesn't take much dot-connecting prowess to go from a segment on the Iraq war to a segment on our preparedness to fight the avian flu and note the opportunity cost of the resources we're expending in Iraq...READ MORE

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Which Russert is real: the one who demolished Ken Mehlman, or the one who parroted Mehlman to try to demolish Howard Dean?

On Sunday's Meet the Press, Russert said there were "five government officials and three journalists, including yours truly, included in [the Plamegate indictment]." That's it. Just one cute, glib mention of his involvement. But it's not enough, and thanks to Tom Maguire, Mickey Kaus, and Accuracy in Media, we know just how not-enough it is. If Russert wants to emerge from this mess with more credibility than Scooter Libby, he needs to stop letting bloggers tell the public what may or may not be going on. Truly.