THE BIG NEWS of the weekend was the condition of Walter Reed Army Medical Center’s outpatient facilities, and the care that wounded veterans were receiving there. Face the Nation featured interviews with Senators Carl Levin and Joe Lieberman, as well as one of the coauthors of the Washington Post piece that brought this story to light. Lieberman told Bob Schieffer that one result of this survey should be a reassessment of the decision to close Walter Reed. “Actually, I want to say first about Walter Reed, this second look at Walter Reed, brought on by the Washington Post investigation, ought to lead us to take a second look at the [Base Realignment and Closure Commission] decision to close Walter Reed. The fact is we’re going to be in this war on terrorism for some time to come. It’s going to give us more veterans. We need to decide, frankly, whether we want to expand and improve Walter Reed as opposed to closing it and consolidating it up at Bethesda.”
Anne Hull talked to Schieffer about the preparation of story. After admitting she kept the Army in the dark for several months about the conditions she and Dana Priest were writing about, she discussed the basic outline of her story as one concerned not solely with the decrepit conditions of the housing. Rather, this was a human interest story: “We looked at Building 18 as sort of the symbolic heart of darkness, but the real problem is the bureaucracy that these guys have to deal with. They’re literally languishing for a year or two there. They have to prove they were in Iraq. The Army is in disarray. They had four years of casualties. We had one soldier who had to bring his Purple Heart to prove that he even served in Iraq. We had a medic who served three tours and had to bring in pictures of herself in Iraq to prove she served. And every day these small insults added up to just a very hard experience for people living there.”
Fox News Sunday’s Chris Wallace sat down with two members of the Congressional intelligence committees, Senator Dianne Feinstein and Rep. Pete Hoekstra. Hoekstra urged patience in dealing with the situation in Pakistan, saying “I think there’s no doubt that we degraded the capability of al Qaeda, but they’re regrouping . . . we’ve got a full court press going on there, we may want Pakistan to do some more things, but President Musharraf is facing elections in September, there are parliamentary election next January; we need stability in the regime, we need this regime to survive.” Feinstein was concerned with recent revelations regarding North Korean nuclear facilities: “We now do know that North Korea has nuclear devices. The question is, how many? The question is, where are they assembling these things? . . . North Korea is a long way from us, and the intelligence infrastructure is not that good, to be very candid with you, so it’s a difficult problem to know with any certainty.”
In the roundtable, Bill Kristol echoed Feinstein’s concern regarding America’s intelligence capabilities, saying “The intelligence community is broken, has been broken, and there’s been, the president despite sort of trying to fix it, hasn’t yet.” Refocusing on domestic presidential politics, Nina Easton wondered what sort of candidate Republicans would go for, asking “is this an abortion primary, which Mara touched on, is this about social issues. Or is it a competence question?” Mara Liasson touched on the growing tumultuousness swirling about the Clinton campaign. “The Clinton camp sees Barack Obama as a tremendous threat,” she noted, adding that “Senator Clinton is talking more and more about her husband on the campaign trail, he’s very involved in the campaign, but he is making calls for her. I think that is both a tremendous strength, because he is incredibly popular with the Democratic base and with black voters, which of course is what she is competing with Barack Obama for. But it’s also a potential, it’s a double edged sword.”
Trent Lott and Charles Schumer discussed the strategy in Iraq on This Week. Talking about a new resolution the Democrats were working on, Schumer said “The consensus is this: that we ought to change the mission. The mission in Iraq has devolved into policing a civil war. Having our troops walk up and down Haifa Street as the Sunnis and Shiites who have hated each other for centuries shoot at one another. We want to change it to have a much more narrow focus, and that’s on counterterrorism, as well as force protection.” Lott urged the Democrats to follow the founders instead of playing politics: “This is about the Congress trying to micromanage the situation. When the going gets tough, they’re trying to figure out how to get out. They can’t get their act together on how to defund the troops, so they’re having all these different approaches: You’ve had the Biden Resolution, the Levin Resolution, the Pelosi/Reid Resolution, the Murtha ‘Slow Bleed’ Resolution.”
The roundtable discussed Rudy Giuliani’s recent surge in the polls, with E.J. Dionne highlighting Rudy’s performance after 9/11 and the current Republican mindset: “A lot of conservatives care a lot about, number one, winning, and number two, about the terror issue. Rudy Giuliani was effectively our president for three or four days.” George Will wondered aloud whether Giuliani’s domestic politics would be far enough to the left to put the biggest electoral prize back on the table. “Any candidate who can show the Republicans,” he said, “that they can put California, with 55 electoral votes, back in play has an enormous leg up in saying ‘I’m the winner.'”
Sonny Bunch is assistant editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
