bobo brooks on lehrer

there was a remarkable segment on lehrer tonight - first they discussed the new book - Cobra2 (man, isnt that getting some press!)

DAVID BROOKS: Well, the book is gripping reading, infuriating reading. You want to throttle Donald Rumsfeld and -- and Tommy Franks in particular, but a lot of other people, including the president and the vice president.

What you see is, first of all, how much they stifled debate. There were a series officers who knew better, knew what was going on. And, as -- as Gordon mentioned, one of them was -- they tried to fire. A lot now regret they didn't say something in meetings, because the atmosphere was so stifling of free debate.

And then the other thing you're -- you are furious about is that, as -- as the authors said, March 24 comes along. They are hitting resistance in Nasiriyah. They -- it's time to adjust. They never adjusted. It is not only people in the military who knew they had to adjust. I went back and looked at the punditry from columnists.

Everyone was saying: This is a guerrilla war. It's no longer against the Republican Guard. We need more troops. The colonels who sat at this table, sitting here, thousands of miles.

JIM LEHRER: I remember that. I remember that.

DAVID BROOKS: Colonel Lang, Colonel Gardiner. I think Anderson was here.

JIM LEHRER: That's right. That's right.

DAVID BROOKS: And they -- I went back and read those transcripts. They were saying it.

You didn't have to be some super-secret agent to know what was going on. It was in the papers. It was on TV. Everybody knew it, it seems, but Rumsfeld and Franks, because they had some preconception of the war they were going to fight, and they didn't adjust to reality.

JIM LEHRER: Tom.

TOM OLIPHANT: The -- in other words, this is confirming evidence, as opposed to new evidence.

JIM LEHRER: You mean the book--

TOM OLIPHANT: That's right.

that bit is remarkable for a bunch of reasons. and, yes, i wanna throttle david brooks.

*sheesh*

at least oliphant made the point that this shouldnt be new to bobo.

TOM OLIPHANT: And the reason it's so important, because there are going to be more books than this, as this -- these -- this and other -- these and other questions get examined more -- is that -- that the feelings that Andy Kohut was talking about, with regard to the war, people are going to be able to find morsels of information that are very likely to solidify these feelings, rather than to question them.

David is absolutely right. Before, during and after the invasion, you can find the dots, not connecting them. There is no question that David is right about the fault at the top levels of the administration, but, frankly, what I find most interesting is how you can apply this analysis to our own conduct in the press.

And there's no question in my mind that we got sucked along in this atmosphere and didn't really do the kind of questioning job we are supposed to do.

DAVID BROOKS: You see, I don't -- I don't think so. I -- you look at the columns that were being -- Michael Kelly was embedded with the 3rd I.D., David Ignatius of "The Washington Post." There were a whole bunch of columns in the U.S., in the British press, quite a lot, around the world in the Pakistani and Muslim press, all of them beginning to question.

It wasn't -- we remember it and I remember it as: Rah-rah. We are doing great. Aren't our boys great?

But there was a whole series of people who said, these resistance fighters are serious. And we got to take care of this. We are driving right by the enemy.

And one of the -- one of the scenes in the book which lingers is of people at CENTCOM, at Central Command, look -- following the war in real time on computer screens, and the U.S. troops were signified by blue icons. And, as long as those blue icons were moving, they thought, we're winning.

JIM LEHRER: Yes.

DAVID BROOKS: But the blue icons were totally misleading.

yep - all we need to do is connect the morsels...

sheesh.

TOM OLIPHANT: And -- and there was a -- a tip-of-the-iceberg quality to some of this information, including the -- the punditry that David is citing.

The follow-up job that the press exists to do and that we did not do in this war involves -- you hear the number 400,000 troops, for example, which General Shinseki did not say in open session, by the way. It was in a closed session.

JIM LEHRER: He just said -- he just said several hundred -- several hundred thousand.

TOM OLIPHANT: Several hundred. But he actually used a number in closed session...

TOM OLIPHANT: And it didn't come off the top of his head. It came as a result of almost formulas that are used in the military to calculate what you need after something like this.

JIM LEHRER: As they just went through--

TOM OLIPHANT: And there -- that is just one example of an opportunity that we in the press had to develop a story from a tidbit, which, after all, is what we -- what we do in this business.

JIM LEHRER: We are here to do. Good point.

TOM OLIPHANT: And didn't do.

morsels & tidbits. if only we'd read the paksitani press!

DAVID BROOKS: I disagree a little. I think most people who call themselves independent are really partisan. They are just lying. [snip]

You choose the reality you want to see. And, then, the Clinton years, when you had the reverse, this time, it was the Republicans' turn to be more pessimistic and wrong. People choose the reality that flatters themselves.

swings and roundabout - la di da... you win some, ya lose some

JIM LEHRER: What is the reason for the defection of people like William F. Buckley and other prominent conservatives, who have said, hey, this war was a mistake; let's get out of there; words to that effect?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, I -- I would say, philosophically -- and this something that is happening in the Republican Party -- there are conservatives, and then there are American conservatives, I would -- if -- if I could put it that way.

The conservatives, traditionally, have always believed, all conservatives, that you can't change countries dramatically. You don't want to try something dramatic, because there are so many things you don't know. There will be unintended consequences. There are very conservative reasons for not wanting to do this. And I think Bill Buckley had that in him.

And a lot of us who supported the -- had these conservative warnings in the back of our heads, and maybe didn't listen to them as much as -- as we should have.

aka - we were right all along, but we strayed. we should have listened to the little voices inside our conservative heads, or the screaming liberals and anti-war types who were shut out of the discussion.

JIM LEHRER: Let me introduce another guy, who -- speaking of Brzezinski, who said yesterday -- he is going to be on this program Monday night, talking about this whole subject.

But he -- he -- he said that, well, whatever anybody thinks about the Bush administration, the real failure here, too, is among the Democrats, who have come up with no coherent alternative to Iraq -- to the Iraq policy of the Bush administration. Guilty as charged?

DAVID BROOKS: I think, for the liberals, it is guilty as charged.

I think, for a lot of the -- the centrists and -- who supported the war -- I feel like adding that I still support the war. I still think it is going to work out.

But I think they were furious at Rumsfeld and Bush. But, over the past two years, in particular, I think they've come to see that there has been -- in the last two years, there has been some adaptation, and that the counterinsurgency tactics we are now using, the Zalmay Khalilzad tactics we are using on the political sphere, that stuff is actually working.

Whether it is too late is an open question. But I think, over the past two years, there has been a consensus about what we should do. And, so, I don't blame the moderate Democrats for not coming out against the war right now, because, right now, what we are doing is working. The question is whether it is too late.

my head sooo hurts right now

JIM LEHRER: Before we go -- quickly -- what do you think of the Feingold -- speaking -- you mentioned Feingold -- what do you think of the Feingold resolution to censure President Bush on the NSA surveillance thing?

DAVID BROOKS: I think the conventional thing, that Republicans -- any time Democrats are in the news, Republicans feel good about it. When Republicans are in the news, they feel bad about it.

DAVID BROOKS: So, it was -- it was good for the Republicans. And I think most Democrats acknowledge that.

TOM OLIPHANT: Yes, but a little polling data to end.

JIM LEHRER: Oh, my goodness.

TOM OLIPHANT: For censure or against it, American Research Group last week: for, 48, against, 43 -- impeachment: against, 50, for, 43. There is...

JIM LEHRER: You mean this is a national poll?

TOM OLIPHANT: That's right, 1,100 cases last week.

JIM LEHRER: OK.

TOM OLIPHANT: This -- there are emotions out there in the country. Feingold did not make this up.

You can watch the whole thing online. may sure to put a hat on before-hand - it'll be less messy when your head explodes.

I was just about to say 'i hope driftglass saw this' - apparently he hasn't yet, but he takes bobo to the woodshed for his recent op-ed - and bobo's op-eds are always just about verbatim what he says on lehrer. go read driftglass

update: here's a taste of drifty:

"Because other than a brief bout of conscience immediately following Katrina, Bobo long ago rented out his mouth as a testicle cozy to the Bush White House.

And because Bobo’s Beaten Spouse Syndrome is so ingrained that it now feels like his own skin.

And because his existential terror at facing the abyss of the complete implosion of ideology -- an ideology on which both his psyche and livelihood are entirely dependent –- runs so deep that instead of using Occam's Razor to shave this dog’s ugly ass, Bobo (like all Republicans still clinging hysterically to the Bush Bandwagon as it plummets out of control towards the pointy rocks) must desperately invent increasingly weird, disassociative, Rube Goldberg linguistic contraptions to rationalize away the obvious fact that…

…Dubya’s an Idiot.

A lying, incompetent idiot, being piloted of his own volition and for his own sick, Oedipo-Political reasons like a Predator Drone by evil men for treacherous motives.

He is the "Aw Shucks" Delivery System for the dark, fascistic dreams of the Neocons, Oligarchs and Fundies who rule the GOP."