Flush twice... it's a long way to Sally Quinn's place!

Papal Pap
for April 24, 2005
God Squad Takes Near-full Control of Sunday Blabfests
byJJ Balzer

April 25, 2005 (apj.us) -- Diversions, diversions!

There are so many juicy stories going on -- the religious right's attack on the independent judiciary, the devolution of John Bolton's nomination as UN Ambassador from sputtering to stalled thanks to -- surprise! -- Republican Senator Voinovich, and the breaking news this morning that Tom DeLay has again been caught in violation of House ethics rules in the form of airfare to Scotland paid for by casino lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

So we settled into the comfy chair with the full expectation that the most respected Sunday political show of them all, NBC's Meet the Press, would delve into the issues, the controversies, the multiple political facets with the tenacious Tim Russert putting the tough questions to both sides of the political aisle.

(Okay, okay, so we exaggerate! But face it - that's what NBC wants you to believe Little Russ actually does with their marketing hype, no?)

Instead, Tim turned Meet the Press into The GE Catholic Hour, spending the entire show obsessing on the newly-installed Pope Ratso I with the most Catholicky Catholic panel he has yet hosted. (Hey, I'm a lapsed Catholic, so I can say it!)

Reflexively, this writer grabbed the remote and hastily changed the channel to the East Coast feed of ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos.

George began the proceedings with the news that tomorrow's issues of TIME and Newsweek, and this morning's NY Times, all lead with new allegations concerning the Bush Boy's nominee for UN Ambassador, John Bolton.

Steph confronted one of his senatorial guests, Republican John Kyl, with Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's assertion that some in the Senate GOP leadership now have questions about Bolton; Kyl gave a mealy-mouthed answer that telegraphed his own serious doubt that Bolton's nomination is even going to make it out of committee. Steph's other guest, Democratic Senator Joe Biden focused on allegations that Bolton tried to fire an intelligence official because his accurate data on Cuba was not what Bolton had been looking for to go after the Castro regime on a trumped-up WMD charge -- "It chills honesty," said Biden. (Biden should have been far tougher and said, "Bolton's problem isn't that he can't handle the truth, because we know he can't -- he doesn't want the truth if it doesn't fit his agenda." See, Joe? That's how it's done.)

Steph said there are now allegations that Bolton falsified intelligence on Syria, China and Iran. Kyl tried to defuse Biden's assertion, "proving" the subordinate was wrong because his supervisors apologized for his conduct. Kyl called Bolton "extraordinarily capable" -- but you could hear the desperation in his voice. Biden coolly said viewers must think this is a partisan tit-for-tat before he completely nuked Kyl's spin, reading comments by the supervisor that contradict Kyl's assertion. Biden also named the intel professional and supervisor as he read parts of their e-mail exchange that show the supervisor supported the intel pro in the face of Bolton's intimidation.

Kyl said that he does not think it's factually correct that Powell has called his colleagues, insinuating that the NY Times is wrong, but Steph said it's clear from several sources that Powell opposes the nomination. Kyl tried to depict Bolton as a "tough guy" who should be sent to a "corrupt" UN. Biden interjected: Jack Straw asked Powell to take Bolton off the Libya case because Bolton was undermining it -- and that wasn't something that happened 25 years ago. (That was a slap at the GOP talking point claiming that all of the "controversy" over Bolton is about "warmed-over charges from over a decade ago" about his "assertive" personality.)

Then Steph turned to the Christian-Dominionist attack on the independent judiciary -- though he didn't call that, choosing to couch it in vaguer, less descriptive terms that obfuscated the push by a tiny minority of Bible-beaters to turn America into a Christian dictatorship. Steph showed a little of Sen. Bill Frist's taped message for a Christian TV special to be broadcast tonight called "Burn All the Liberal Judges At the Stake for Jesus, especially Justice Kennedy" (or something like that). Frist, who had leaked the message to the networks to maximize its news impact, was trying to spin the issue as "restoring rules" by killing judicial filibusters -- but Biden cast Frist as a liar, citing the filibuster of Abe Fortas. Moreover, added Biden, the Senate has green-lighted 205 of 215 of the Chimp's nomination, and has rejected extremists like Janice Brown, who called one ruling of the conservative-dominated Supreme Court "socialist" and is anti-New-Deal. It's NOT, emphasized Biden, about abortion -- it's about radical stands on issues. The best Kyl could do was the old "they deserve an up or down vote" talking point (yawn), but he also mentioned that Brown's a sharecropper's daughter (as if that would necessarily make her a better arbiter of constitutional issues), and if she's too radical, Senators can vote "no."

Biden, to our disappointment, said he would support a compromise -- the two most radical nominees (Brown and the perfectly awful Priscilla Owen) would not be approved, the rest would.

Say... that pink tutu looks great on you, Joe!

Following the break, we though for a brief moment that the producers of Meet the Press had hijacked ABC studio as Steph turned to the pressing Washington issue of -- you guessed it -- the Coronation of Pope Ratso I! Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger got his cassock, his shawl (no, it wasn't Hugo Boss, but it still looked stylin'), and the hippest Papal perk of all, his muscle-car-meets-sport-utility-vehicle Popemobile, with the top down to boot! It wasn't as big as Arnold Gröpenführer's Hummer, but sure looked a loot cooler. Steph debated which way the Catholic Church will go with two Catholic theologians, which immediately prompted most serious Sunday political show viewers to run to the kitchen for another cup of coffee. We'll provide the answer nobody gave: the hard-line theocratic doctrine of Pope Ratso I will drive American Catholics to check out their local Episcopal, UCC, and Unitarian parishes! Steph said Ratso spoke out against the "filth" (child abuse) in the church during a carefully-watched homily, then pitched Ratso as the man who would "clean up" the church.

Problem is, Ratso helped cover it all up in the first place -- but don't look for Steph to tell you that troubling facet of the story!

Following the break, Steph lorded over the weekly roundtable. The good news: no sign of the huffy, unctuous Cokie Roberts. The bad news: some booker at ABC had nabbed the perfectly awful cheerleader for the Bush Boy, alleged New York Times "journalist" Elizabeth Bumiller. And "Liz Bummer," as more enlightened news junkies have come to call her, did not disappoint Karl Rove, spinning the Bolton mess quite tidily:
the Chimp has nothing to lose with the Bolton nomination;
Bolton is a Cheney protégé;
on the other hand, Condi Rice is "not unhappy" that John-Bob's out from inside the Department of State;
if Bolton blows up it's "not embarrassing."

To our delight, the usually stuffy, prissy George Will completely obliterated Liz Bummer's first talking point when he provided a reason for the vigorous White House defense of Bolton: the high stakes. If Bolton goes down, the Chimp's "lame duck quotient" goes up.

Fareed Zakaria, who comes across as one of the few consistently intelligent pundits on the Sunday yadda yadda circuit, reminded viewers that Bolton was in effect dissenting from Powell and even the Chimp -- and he had been wrong on Cuba, on Libya, and of course on Iraq's WMDs.

Steph said he could not believe Team Smirko had no idea that these stories would not come out -- and Bummer tried to claim that the only factual sin Bolton committed was Cuba's WMDs. (You'd think she was oblivious to what Zakaria just said. In fact, we think she was. Did the bookers slip a one-two Ambien-Xanax "sweetener" in her coffee to keep her on message?)

When talk turned to the increasingly chaotic situation in Iraq -- the sputtering government that can't seem to agree on appointing anyone as insurgents have launched increasingly sophisticated attacks -- only Zakaria got it right: the insurgency, while operating from a position of relative weakness, is fomenting a sense of insecurity, which impacts reconstruction and transportation and underscores the fundamental error of too few troops -- American and Iraqi -- on the ground. Now there's something you don't see that often on This Week: a real journalist cutting through the pap and telling it like it is.

On the other hand, there was not word one about the big, ugly breaking news about Tom DeLay having broken the ethics rules - and possibly the law - by letting Jack Abramoff and Ed Buckham put DeLay's travel expenses for a Scotland junket on their credit card.

Oops! Someone forgot to read the morning papers.

Or did they?

Over on CBS's Face the Nation, Chris Dodd made a comment that should be making the headlines tomorrow -- or not, more likely, given how scared the big city newspapers seem of Karl Röve:

Bob Schieffer: : [There are allegations that John Bolton] tried to hype intelligence in a different area, and that British diplomats actually complained about him and said that he was making it impossible to try to come to some agreement on how to deal with Iran Senator Dodd [D-CT], can you confirm, is that -- or is the Foreign Relations Committee investigating those things now?

Senator (Chris) Dodd: I'm told they are, and we reached an agreement -- Senator Biden did and Senator Lugar - on how to proceed over these next couple of weeks, and one of the agreements was to have cooperation between majority and minority staffs. They'd be present, have these depositions taken under oath, recorded depositions, so we have the transcripts properly down, and then seeking the kind of cooperation we'll need from the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency, among others, so that we can get the information in a timely fashion so that members will have the opportunity to look over this material

...

These are the most serious allegations, this and the intimidation of intelligence analysts. There needs to be a firewall, in my view, between policy-setters and intelligence. That wall ought to be sacrosanct. In the case of Mr. Bolton, on five different occasions over a space of 48 months, confirmed by a series of witnesses, all of whom are officials in the Bush administration, Mr. Bolton sought to have fired two intelligence analysts, one at the State Department, one at the Central Intelligence Agency. To me, once you've done that--it's not about his personality and how blunt he is or how--whether or not he's got the management skills. Those aren't things that I'm as concerned about as I am violating this wall between policy and intelligence.

Uh-oh! This looks like more than just a flap over "allegations that are a decade old," don'tcha think? Mitch McConnnell, who does look like an elderly Cabbage Patch doll, tried to polish the turd:

He's been confirmed four times by the Senate. [For far less sensitive and public positions, Mitchie.] He's had a long public career. [So did Warren Harding and Boss Tweed. Your point?] He's testified before the Foreign Relations Committee for eight hours already. [And we're beginning to wonder how many times he perjured himself, Mitchie. Thanks for the reminder!] As recently as 2001, my good friend Chris Dodd said of John Bolton an indivi -- that he was an individual of integrity and intelligence. That was just four years ago. [Before the truth about him started to come out.]

Gotta love that Mitch! Schieffer threw up some cover for his brother's patrons in the executive branch by obsessing on the reports that Bolton was chasing his subordinates through the halls of a Moscow hotel, berating them all the way. (No surprise there -- that's the kind of professional conduct that appeals to hard-right rubes anyway.)

When Schieffer asked Dodd about a possible filibuster of Bolton, Dodd coyly said he does not know about such a move in the offing. (Translation: the press has heard that it's being seriously mulled, and the Dems may be able to get enough votes to shut down the nomination permanently.)

Following the break, McConnell refused to give Schieffer a second potential headline when Schieffer pressed him about whether or not there are enough votes to block filibusters of judicial extremists. McConnell's non-money quote -- "I never announce my whip count" -- before claiming that the GOP now has enough votes to change the rule (i.e. 50 GOPers, with Big Time Dick to break the tie).

The big question remains: will Frist actually do it? The political blowback could be very, very costly. Dodd threw down the "triple-dog-dare" gauntlet:

I would just warn my Republican friends, you know, things do change, and be careful what you wish for in these matters. I wonder if people in some of the states in the South, for instance, are going to be terribly happy when a Democrat president, a Democratic president sitting there, virtually deciding for him- or herself who the federal judges will be out of that state because you'll no longer have to consult with the senators from those states as you do today, because of the importance of having some comity in working things out.

We're banking on Frist going nuclear. Get ready for a bumpy ride - and for the GOP to regret their actions.

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