Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace got the week started by interviewing former Tennessee senator, and current film and television actor, Fred Thompson about his intentions with regard to the 2008 presidential race. He came off as a true conservative, positioning himself against gay marriage, strongly against gun control, for the overturn of Roe v. Wade, and for allowing individual states to decide the issue of civil unions for gay couples. He told Wallace “We ought to give great leeway to the states and not have federal government and not have the Supreme Court of the United States making social policy that’s contrary to the traditions of this country.” While some GOP primary voters may not be thrilled with his support of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill, he made a strong case in positioning himself as a true conservative.
Maxine Waters, one of the chairs of the Out of Iraq Caucus in the House of Representatives, was also a featured guest. She told Wallace that “The Sunnis and Shiites were getting along before the occupation.” Really? Maybe Waters needs a refresher on the war crimes of Saddam Hussein. She should pay special attention to in the annihilation of the marsh Arabs, a Shiite sect that Hussein reduced from 250,000 to approximately 30,000 people during his brutal reign.
In the roundtable, Juan Williams went after the liberal blogosphere and their decision to attack Democrats for attending a debate hosted by Fox News and the Nevada Democratic party, a move that will earn the NPR correspondent no love from Markos Moulitsas and his acolytes. Said Williams,
You don’t like the kind of broadcasting that FOX does, although it’s quite successful and has a legitimate audience, people are listening and being informed on the basis of Fox journalism, and then you say ‘we’re not going to play ball with them.’ To my mind, that is contrary to the principles that should be advocated by anyone who is liberal or progressive, or whatever kind of language they want. You want open and full fledged, full throated debate, that’s what you want. And nobody has said that this wasn’t going to be a legitimate debate with real questions that would put candidates in position to offer real answers.
On Face the Nation, Senators Chuck Schumer and Arlen Specter chatted with Bob Schieffer about the war in Iraq and the attorney general, Alberto Gonzalez. When asked if he would support more troops being sent to the Middle East, Schumer replied,
I think most Democrats will support more troops in Afghanistan. After all, that’s where the nexus of terrorism is; Bin Laden is still there. The new reports show that they are–al-Qaeda’s setting up camps that might have the capability of hurting America. But, as for Iraq, whether it’s 4,000 more troops or 40,000 more troops, we Democrats believe almost unanimously that we need a dramatic change in course, change in strategy away from policing a civil war and much more in the direction of a much more limited and narrow mission, which is preventing terrorism, such as we’re trying to prevent in Afghanistan.
Specter criticized Democratic plans to manage each individual move the president makes, but wasn’t sure whether he would support sending more troops.
As yet, the Democrats in the House, who have taken the lead on curtailing funding, have not come up with a plan. You have Congressman Murtha’s proposal, which is excessive micromanagement, can’t be done . . . in the Senate, we have not yet had our debate on–on Iraq. So I think it’s premature to say what we’re going to do with this request for additional funding until we dig deeply into the facts and until we can come to some consensus ourselves in the Congress as to what ought to be done.
Schumer then went on to call for the resignation of the head of the Bush Justice Department, Alberto Gonzalez.
Attorney General Gonzalez, in his department, has been even more political than his predecessor, Attorney General Ashcroft. Attorney General Gonzalez is a nice man, but he either doesn’t accept or doesn’t understand that he is no longer just the president’s lawyer, but has a higher obligation to the rule of law and the Constitution even when the president should not want it to be so. And so this department has been so political that I think, for the sake of the nation, Attorney General Gonzalez should step down.
On This Week, Torie Clark gave a pretty fair summary of the Scooter Libby perjury trial. “This is lapsed judgment from beginning to end.
Lapsed judgment because some administration officials were engaging in some penny ante politics against a guy who just wasn’t that important. . . . They were attacking this guy who just wasn’t that important and the column wasn’t that important that started all of this. Then the trial was allowed to become about Iraq, and about the alleged leaking of a covert agent’s name–that’s not what this trial was about. Then, Scooter Libby, it seems, was not allowed to introduce evidence that would have bolstered his faulty memory case. And finally we have a juror there saying ‘well, it wasn’t really that we found him guilty of the things that people thought he was guilty of. This is just kind of a joke from start to finish, and it is horrifying the inflated importance it was given.
Meet the Press featured an interview with the American ambassador to Iraq, who confirmed that he has confronted Iran about shipping weapons and money to insurgents in Iraq, and added that there are no plans on the table to release Iranians who have been captured in Iraq.
I said that those officials–they were saying that they are diplomats, and I said that neither the Iraqis nor ourselves have established that they’re diplomats, that they, they, they are Iranian officials associated with the Revolutionary Guards of, of Iran, and the Quds force is part of the Revolutionary Guards, and the Quds force has been providing some of the weapons that we have talked about, E.F.P.’s, that come into, into Iraq. But I did say that the Iraqi government has asked us to expedite our investigation and to complete the process, and that–we’re doing that. But there was no statement made, no promises made about any–anything with regard to a timeline.
Sonny Bunch is assistant editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
