“If the attorney general has committed perjury, or has made false statements to Congress, or has obstructed justice, certainly there should be a special counsel to determine if charges should be brought. Why wouldn’t you do this on such an important matter?”
On This Week, Utah’s Orrin Hatch countered that the Democrats should take a deep breadth and get back to the business of passing legislation.
“Look, to have a crime of perjury under the federal code … you’ve got to have a person who makes statements that he really does not believe are true, and frankly, nobody can say that about the testimony of Judge Gonzales.”
And Face the Nation featured two more Senators going on and on about the AG, but Bob Schieffer also helmed a segment on an issue that, if I had to guess, far more Americans actually care about: sports. Talking about the recent spate of scandals in the world of sports (Michael Vick’s indictment on drug fighting charges; Barry Bonds’s steroid-fueled assault on Hank Aaron’s home run record nearing its end; and the NBA official who may have gambled on games he himself was officiating), the Kansas City Star‘s Jason Whitlock said that athletes are entertainers nowadays, and we shouldn’t put them on the pedestal that athletes once rested upon:
“I think that perhaps our expectations as fans, as citizens here in America, we have to change our expectations for athletes. They are entertainers and celebrities like the movie stars, and we need to treat them as such and not hold them to pretend like they have some integrity that other celebrities have. It’s just not going to happen. I look at Kobe Bryant and the problems he experienced. He’s basically a child TV star, and that’s why he’s been so immature. He got taken off to LA as a 17-, 18-year-old kid, given a bunch of money. What do you expect? This happens in TV, and we see these kids implode, and that’s what’s happened with Kobe Bryant. So I just think we need to recognize that the days of athletes holding such a high place in our society, those days are over. They’ve been hijacked by money and fame, and they’re not coming back.”
Meet the Press featured a relatively boring all-panel episode, but there was one pretty handy insight offered by the Los Angeles Times‘s Ron Brownstein. Speaking of the Democratic primary, Brownstein said,
“I disagree with both Dan [Balz, of the Washington Post] and John [Harwood, of the Wall Street Journal] that John Edwards winning Iowa would fundamentally change the race. It would change the race if he can–if he’s able to follow it up in New Hampshire or thereafter, which is a challenge for him in particular, and for Southern candidates historically, in general, have not done well in New Hampshire. The Clinton campaign, I think, would rather have John Edwards do well in Iowa because of the belief that he is less likely to translate that into future success. Now, if Edwards crumbles in Iowa because of the difficulty of sustaining local support when he’s not run–polling well nationally, the risk to Hillary Clinton is that Obama could win Iowa, and with the momentum from Iowa, going into New Hampshire, a state where he already leads among independent voters, though he trails among Democrats, that, it would seem to me, is a much greater risk to her than having John Edwards win and, in effect, potentially–unless he can translate it elsewhere–taking Iowa off the table, the way a Tom Harkin did. It–Iowa becomes much more of an all-or-nothing event for Hillary Clinton if John Edwards loses ground.”
