MSNBC Flings Shit Onto Page, Calls it Analysis

Howard Fineman serves up today’s delicious helping of steaming tripe on MSNBC.

Does Rice really know her role?

Hey, he had to call it something, and “Black Women Belong in the Kitchen” didn’t quite have the nuance he was looking for.

How national security adviser's testimony hurt Bush

Nice subtitle, but it would’ve been better called “More crap I’m going to fling onto a page.”

WASHINGTON - Republicans who'd been hoping that Condi Rice would calm the political waters with her testimony to the 9/11 commission have to be disappointed.

If he’d listen to a single Republican he’d find out we’re absolutely delighted. We’ve been laughing and cheering all day.

Stylistically and tactically, she was serviceable.

Serviceable? I wonder how much he’ll offer for her. Maybe he should check her teeth before bidding.

Her voice seemed to quaver at times, but overall she was a confident master of detail, choosing, for the most part, to praise rather than confront the accusatory Richard Clarke.

Actually she smacked him like a bug, without going overboard on it.

But the larger picture she painted of herself, her president and the administration certainly won't help George W. Bush's re-election chances.

Oh, so this “journalist” thinks derailing the left’s insane quest to prove that Bush wasn’t doing anything to fight terror is going to hurt Bush. I could’ve guessed as much.

A self-proclaimed expert at understanding "structural" change in large institutions, Rice wasn't aware — may still not be aware — that the nature of her job had changed by the time she took over as national security adviser in January 2001.

Of course she’s not aware of the left’s newly designated role for her. I guess instead of analyzing NATIONAL SECURITY she should’ve been making tea and cookies in the White House kitchen.

Reared in the Cold War era, she saw herself following in the footsteps of Henry Kissinger. "National security" was largely a matter of global state-to-state diplomacy.

Boy, you’d think with that tone all those cold warriors are soooo obsolete and backwards. So why didn’t he just say “Reared down in the ante-bellum South on a plantation?”

In fact, as her predecessor in effect warned her when he was turning over the keys, the model was no longer so much Kissinger as it was, say, Elliott Ness or J. Edgar Hoover.

Actuallly, journalists who actuallly listened to the testimony wouldn’t have referred to events that didn’t take place, now would they? And we really need an Elliott Ness to go arrest all of China for bullet smuggling when they try and invade Taiwan, now don’t we? Can you say “dumbass journalist spews garbage”? I thought you could.

If, as she said, we had been at war with terrorism for 20 years; if, as she said, the terrorists are determined to attack America, then the NSC chief has to be a ruthless hunter for clues around the world — and on American soil.

No, she said that terrorists had been at war with us for 20 years, while we had not been at war with them. That the problem was we had people running around like Eliot Ness instead of taking strategic actions in the old “state-to-state” model where we hand people’s asses to them. But I’m sure something like the entire fucking point would be lost on a journalist looking for nuance, or trying to get a better look at her teeth, or whatever this dingbat was doing during her testimony.

Asked at the hearing why she hadn't pressed the FBI more closely about what it knew, or didn't know, about domestic terrorist threats, she acted as though the question was an odd one: It wasn't her job. Well, in retrospect, it was and now certainly is.

She’s the National Security advisor. Maybe he can’t read, but they don’t generally deal with FBI things like hunting the Unibomber or asking if any students were overstaying their visas.

Rice identified the chief "structural" problem — that the CIA and FBI don't share information — in a speech she gave in October 2000.

So she was prescient and perceptive about structural problems in the makeup of US intelligence. Doesn’t that sound like exactly the person we want in that position?

She even said that the problem could result in a disastrous domestic terrorist attack. And yet, based on her own testimony, she did little or nothing before 9/11 to break down those walls.

And the walls between the FBI and CIA were put up by whom? What was that you said? “Congress.” There you go! And who is it that keeps screaming about sharing intelligence? The Patriot Act? Bueller? Anyone? “Left wing Kerry voters.” Yes!

The student of bureaucratic change didn't really attempt to foment any, at least not with the kind of urgency we know she needed to have.

I love how he just tries to though the word “bureaucratic” and “student” into the same sentence, as if he desperately wants to use the N word, but is shying away from it. Actually Condi started out as an expert in the power politics of confronting the Soviet empire, but let’s leave that aside for now.

And Rice's tone was perhaps too steely: The response to terrorism over the years had been "insufficient," she said. What a bland word when a soothing sense of regret was required. She was a bureaucrat explaining "structure" to a national audience (and a chamber full of family members) that yearned for blunt talk.

Oh, maybe she should just fucking hire Al Gores fashion consultant while she’s at it. This sanctimonious ass-wipe is striving for a Mareen Dowd moment, isn’t he? Maybe he should be more forthright and describe many of those family members as people in the Theresa Heinz Kerry funded Tides Foundation supported roll-over-and-die peace movement?

Rice, in the end, is just a cog in a machine.

What a description for the most powerful woman in human history. I wonder what cogs are selling for on the old cog market, anyway? Can these democrats not look at a black person and see something other than a piece of merchandise?

The real political question is: How did her testimony enrich the narrative of what the president did — or didn't — know and do about terrorism before 9/11? In an interview with Bob Woodward, Bush admitted two years ago that he didn't have a sense of "urgency" about al-Qaida. He said he wasn't "on point" — wasn't locked on a target in hunting dog fashion.

If we ever have a National Security Advisor who thinks their jobs is to “enrich the narrative”, just take them out and shoot them. And aren’t the same idiots who are trying to accuse Bush of not being “on point” the same ones who accused him of being obsessed with Bin Laden? That just a quibble I have about dumbass journalists and politicians who argue opposite sides of an issue. Kind of like Kerry, who tries to take on an issue by surrounding it on all sides until it surrenders in utter bewilderment.

That admission caused few ripples when it was published. But now voters may revisit the remark. Why? Because it's now clear that the president may have had urgent reason to be "on point." Rice was told about al-Qaida cells by Richard Clarke in February of 2001.

She wrote a fucking book on Al-Qaeda in 2000, but I’m sure Clarke threw out a few tidbits like “They’re bad! They’re very bad men! But don’t make them mad!” But I like how this dingbat journalist is trying to stay on message. They must’ve had some meeting where they decided to pretend Condi had never heard of Al-Qaeda, despite having written extensively on the subject.

When, if ever, did she tell the president about them?

Tell the president about them? Are these idiot journalists so far off into their paranoid delusion that they think the president didn’t already know about them? My fucking mechanic new about them. My garbage man new about them. My cleaning lady new about them. EVERYBODY knew about them, yet these “journalists” are trying to spin as reality the idea than NONE OF US KNEW WHAT WE KNEW. G-d it takes balls, arrogance, and utter stupidity to even attempt that.

The president was given the now-famous PDB of Aug. 6, 2001, which suggested not only that Osama bin Laden was "determined " to attack inside the United States, but that the FBI had picked up a pattern that suggested the possibility of hijackings here.

And all this vast journalismers conspiracy is based on what, “A pattern that suggested”? Everyone knew that Bin Laden wanted to strike us here, there, and everywhere. Everyone knows that Arabs terrorists have hijacked planes before, sometimes quite famously, especially during the 1980’s. What they’ve never, ever done is fly them into buildings.

Did Bush follow up with the FBI? What did he do in the days immediately after getting that PDB? Rice may insist that it wasn't a "warning," but we'll see soon enough when it's released to the public, as it almost surely will be in the days ahead.

Oooo… Prophetic shadowing! I love it when journalists resort to that when even they realize they're just flinging random shit onto a page to meet another deadline.

Remember the picture of the president in the classroom being told by Andy Card of the attack? The American people thought they were seeing a man suddenly thrust into a grave challenge no one could have anticipated.

Oh, like we could’ve seen that one coming. Get a grip. This guy’s so full of shit it’s coming out of his eyeballs.

That won him enormous sympathy and patience from the voters. But what if he was literally on vacation — at the ranch in Crawford — when he should have been making sure that someone was ringing alarm bells throughout the bureaucracy?

What do they think he should’ve been doing?
“Condi. You hear that?”
“What? The traffic?”
“No, not that.”
“The typewriters?”
“No.”
“The telephones?”
“No.”
“The intercom?”
“No.”
“The generals in the hall waiting for the next intelligence briefing?”
“No, not that.”
“Then what?”
“That’s just it. It’s quiet. It’s too quiet… Something’s up.”

Already on the defensive for his leadership in the post 9/11 world — the war in Iraq grows less popular by the day

Hey, he said it, so it must be true.

— Bush now finds himself with questions to answer about his pre-9/11 leadership. He says he's running for re-election as a "war president." But by Rice's own standards, the war was well under way by the time he took office. He was a "war president" the moment he took the oath. But did he act like one? The election may hinge on the answer.

Wait a minute. If Bush is supposed to be a “war president” the minute he took office, doesn’t that mean that Clinton was a "war president" his whole term? Hey, is getting a Lewinsky acceptable under the Geneva conventions? I wonder. Well, one things for sure. During Clinton's war years the enemy certainly didn't suffer any casualties.

Thanks to LC & IB Mamamontezz for the link. This pile of journalistic crap was so bad that the Fisk wrote itself.