This week on “Russert Watch”

It may be a premature declaration of victory (they are all the rage these days after all), but after today’s “Meet the Press,” Russert Watch is ready to declare victory.

Really, you ask? The show’s gotten better? Russert is actually asking follow up questions and holding his guests accountable? Of course not. Sadly, this victory is pretty minor. Last week, you may recall, we noted that the show had degenerated into a series of reading exercises, with Russert putting three- and four-page quotes up on the screen and, yes, reading them to his television audience. This week, the quotes were down to a minimum, and they dressed up the quote screen a bit.

Now if we could just get Tim to ask the kind of follow-up questions that would result in his guests having to draw some conclusions from the points they’re making, that would be a real victory.

This week, it was John McCain who was waved right on through by E-ZPass Tim.

If McCain is so respected by the American people for being a gutsy truth-teller, shouldn’t he be held to that standard on “Meet the Press”? Right from the beginning of the show, McCain ran down the mistakes that were being made in the war in Iraq, but at no point did Russert ask him who was responsible for the mistakes and who should be held accountable.

Here are some of the mistakes McCain pointed out:

McCAIN: Too often...the American people have been told that we're at a turning point, whether it be the capture of Saddam Hussein, or Uday and Qusay, or the elections...

McCAIN: It's a hard slog, Tim. And we've made serious mistakes. And we're paying a price for those mistakes.

McCAIN: What I think we should do, Tim, is wait until we achieve the successes, then celebrate them, rather than predict them. Because too often that prediction has not proven to be true.

McCAIN: The biggest mistake I think we made after September 11 was not calling on Americans to serve. We shouldn't have just told them to go shopping or take a trip.

McCAIN: The weight of evidence [in Guantanamo] has got to be that we've got to adjudicate these people's cases, and...if it means releasing some of them, you'll have to release them. Look, even Adolf Eichmann got a trial.

So after McCain ran down this laundry list of failures (and is there a more serious area for a president to fail than in war?), one would assume Russert would have asked him a question that would draw a conclusion of accountability for these mistakes. After all, these “mistakes” didn’t just happen. Shouldn’t Russert have pointed out, with all due respect to the senator, that “we” didn’t make these mistakes. That they were made, with not a small amount of hubris and incompetence, by specific people. And shouldn’t he have asked the “Straight Talk” senator to name these people?

And after that shouldn’t he have asked him if he agreed with his good friend and colleague Chuck Hagel, who is quoted in tomorrow’s US News and World Report saying: “the reality is that we're losing in Iraq."

But no, instead, he allowed him to say without a challenge:

McCAIN: On the transcendent issues, the most important issues of our day, I've been totally in agreement and support of President Bush. ... And I'm particularly talking about the war on terror, the war in Iraq, national security, national defense, support of men and women in the military, fiscal discipline...

What? How could Tim allow McCain to get away with using the words “fiscal discipline” and “Bush” in the same breath? And on the war? How could he allow him to get way with saying that he’s “totally in agreement and support of President Bush” on the war as if the first part of the show where he enumerated all the mistakes being made in Iraq meant nothing? How do you retain any credibility as a hard-hitting journalist after this?

That’s how Russert perpetuates the Washington parlor game where words and language mean absolutely nothing. Maybe he’s been in the Beltway so long that this BS doesn’t even register.

Instead of ol' Tim calling McCain on his near-operatic lie that he’s “totally in agreement and support of President Bush,” he quickly retreated to the safe clubby confines of insider process journalism.

RUSSERT: In fact, you have just hired his political consultant, Mark McKinnon, to work with you?

Thanks, Tim.

Ironically, the one instance of accountability that Russert got out of McCain had to do not with President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Secretary Rumsfeld continuing to mislead the American people on the war, but with Senator Durbin for using excessive language to make a valid point about Guantanamo.

On this, Russert asked not one but two follow-up questions. Here’s the exchange:

RUSSERT: Your Democratic colleague Dick Durbin of Illinois set off a firestorm when he compared the actions of Americans at Guantanamo to Nazis, Soviet Gulags and Pol Pot. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said that Senator Durbin should be censured by the Senate for those comments.

McCAIN: Well, I think that Senator Durbin owes not only the Senate an apology—I don't know if censure would be in order--but an apology because it does a great disservice to men and women who suffered in the gulag and in Pol Pot's killing fields. Dick Durbin should be required to read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago" and I think that he would--may have a better understanding that there's no comparison whatsoever. And it does a great disservice to the majority of men and women who are serving in Guantanamo who are doing the job that they're told to do and they're doing it in a humane fashion. To tar the American servicemen and women with a brush that applies to the gulag or the killing fields is a great disservice to the men and women in the military who are serving honorably down there.

RUSSERT: Should he formally apologize?

McCAIN: Well, I don't know what a formal--but he should certainly apologize.

RUSSERT: Will the Senate take any action against him?

McCAIN: I predict to you that by the time this program is shown next Sunday that Mr. Durbin will have apologized.

Wow. So, Russert got McCain to make a huge deal not over the need for Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld to be held accountable but over the need for Durbin to apologize.

Perhaps the motto for the show should be what McCain said when Russert asked him about the Terri Schiavo episode:

McCAIN: Maybe we didn't use our brains as well as we should have.

Well said.