Chris Wallace spent 30 minutes with Rudy Giuliani this morning on Fox News Sunday, leading off the interview with the issue that will present “America’s Mayor” with his biggest challenge in the Republican primary: abortion.
I oppose it, that’s a principle I’ve held for forever and I’ll hold it forever, that’s not gonna change. But I also believe that, in a society like ours where people have very very different consciences about this, it’s best for us to respect each other’s differences and allow for choice. … I am open and will continue to be open to ways to limit abortion. What I am not open to is to removing the right. … If you can find ways to limit abortion, which I would think would be a constructive thing to do, I will probably find a way to support that.
Over at This Week, Barack Obama was the featured guest, and George Will paid the freshman senator from Illinois an exceptional compliment:
He has perfect pitch, I think, for the mood of the country, which is a flinch from the rhetorical vitriol for the mood that is consuming this town. He’s a little like Ronald Reagan in this regard: Reagan used to drive people crazy, in the Democratic party, because they’d say “The public doesn’t agree with him on this or this or this or this, and they vote for him.” They voted for him because they said we like him, he’s not off putting, he’s not frightening, and I think this is another 1980.
Meet the Press spent an hour with John McCain, who was called on yet again to remind the American people of just what’s at stake in Iraq and what failure would mean (namely, chaos).
The consequences of failure, Tim, are that there would be chaos in the region. There’s three–two million Sunni in Baghdad. The Iranians would continue to increase their influence, the Saudis would have to help the Sunni, the Kurds would want independence, the Turks will never stand for it. Some people say partition. You’d have to partition bedrooms in Baghdad because Sunni and Shia are, are married. This, this is a very, very difficult situation, but the consequences of failure, in my view, are unlike the Vietnam War where we could leave and come home and it was over, that these people will try to follow us home and the region will erupt to a point where we may have to come back or we will be combating what is now, to a large degree, al-Qaeda, although certainly other–many other factors of sectarian violence, in the region.
Countering McCain’s view was Chuck Hagel, who appeared on Face the Nation and repeated his call for retreat.
That’s right, this is a–this is a civil, sectarian war. Yes, al Qaeda’s there. Yes, terrorists are there. But they are not the predominant aspect of this. And I’m really sorry to see some of the administration continue to say that this is the [central] front [in the war] on terrorism, this war. It’s not. This is a sectarian, civil war.
