April 19, 2004 PERMALINK
The Sunday Talkshow Breakdown
A weekly feature of LiberalOasis
(posted April 19 2:30 AM ET)

Condi v. Woodward

Condi Rice hit three shows yesterday.

On ABC’s This Week, she got lucky, as no one bothered to bring up the revelations in Bob Woodward’s latest book.

(Perhaps because ABC didn’t want to go out of its way to plug Woodward’s explosive appearance last night on CBS’ 60 Minutes).

On Fox News Sunday, she got a few pointed questions about it, even a couple-follow-ups. But nothing that she wasn’t prepared for.

But CBS’ Face The Nation was another story.

Host Bob Schieffer and Time’s Karen Tumulty were fierce and incredulous.

Here are some of their questions and comments:

-- SCHIEFFER: Now I think many Americans are going to want to know how is it that it was necessary to brief the ambassador from Saudi Arabia before the secretary of State was told about it?

-- SCHIEFFER: Well, normally don't Secretaries of State, aren't they the ones that deal with ambassadors? Why was he not in on that meeting?

-- TUMULTY: $700 million was approved by the president and then diverted from a supplemental appropriations bill that had been meant for Afghanistan.

Was it really wise to be diverting resources from Afghanistan where we were rooting out al-Qaida, and was it legal even to do that without telling Congress?

-- SCHIEFFER: But, Dr. Rice, you cannot take money that Congress has appropriated for one purpose and spend it on something else. That's against the law.

-- TUMULTY: Between all the other failures of intelligence that we know about and this moment where the CIA director is assuring the commander in chief who is preparing to go to war that he has a slam-dunk case:

It sort of raises the question of why George Tenet still has a job.

Why does the president continue to place so much faith in George Tenet as CIA director?

How did Condi handle the onslaught?

On the Saudi question, she tried to reject (as the wires reported) Woodward’s account that Prince Bandar was shown the war plans before Powell.

Yet she was unable to say that Powell was formally briefed on the plans first.

Instead, she said Powell was “privy

Let me guess too! It is all just a good faith, honest attempt by unbiased opposition party members and their running dogs to get to the truth. And those bad Repubs, they are just temporalizing. Demos never do that.

Truth. Hah. An ounce of that substance in Washington is more dangerous that a dirty nuclear bomb.