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By Mark Kilmer Posted in Elections — Comments (1) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Another Sunday morning, and most of the news of the early week has been made. We had Dick Durbin questioning whether North Korea was run by a tyrant and raising John Danforth as the model for U.N. ambassadors.

Bob Schieffer seems to be getting a tad cocky, making some questionable declarations.

Joe Biden divided the ten rejected judicial nominees into two categories, separating out three of them as a purely "Michigan problem." (Stabenow and Levin are blocking the nominees, they acknowledge, as payback for Republicans block two Clinton nominees from Michigan.)

I look forward to the coming week.

Read on for the complete review of the shows…

TIM RUSSERT'S RELIGION PANEL. Looking for politics, I did not spend much time on NBC's Meet the Press, where host Tim Russert sat down a group of about seven or eight people to talk about this or that in its relation to Christianity and the Catholic Church. That the panel included noted Catholic E.J. Dionne, lecturing the Pope on modernity, and Newsweek editor Jon Meacham mumbling inanities about nothing, sprinkling it with a few near-quotes of St. Augustine in a strange attempt to draw a line of separation between God and church, served this panel none the better.

DURBIN AND GRAHAM ON FNS. This session on FOX News Sunday had its moments. Host Chris Wallace talked to Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Democrat Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois about… John Bolton.

Wallace asked Graham if Bolton would survive two more weeks, what with fresh allegations of bullying and nastiness pouring in apace. Graham said he would, we need the United Nations, and thus we need John Bolton to help fix it. Durbin, on the other hand, called Bolton "a tyrant." This prompted a chuckle from Graham, who challenged: "You said it, go prove it." He said that all U.S. Senators have "bad tempers on certain days." (A line borrowed from Dick Cheney.)

Durbin accepted the challenge -- "I'll prove it!" -- and offered as proof that Colin Powell and Dick Armitage have said that Bolton is a tyrant. They have not, of course, but Durbin quickly added that John Danforth, who completely ignored then-Secretary of State Colin Powell when he voted full confidence in Kofi Annan, was a great U.N. ambassador. Bolton, he added, "is not of that standard." (And there is another good reason to confirm Bolton.

Durbin lectured: "Most people respect Colin Powell. He's decided, for some reason, that he has reservations" about Bolton. (Danforth did not respect Powell, but that's immaterial to his point.) The implication of Durbin's statement is that Colin Powell should be given the veto power over the President's nominee to be U.N. ambassador. And since Durbin purports not to know the reason Powell would veto Bolton, it doesn’t matter. Powell's stature alone does it for Durbin.

Durbin talked about former Ambassador to South Korea Thomas Hubbard, who said that Bolton had picked on him and falsely claimed that he had praised a Bolton speech calling Kim Jong Il, a "tyrannical dictator." Graham countered that this was administration policy, and that North Korea "is a tyrannized dictatorship."

Wallace asked them about Bill Frist's appearance on a TV program, Justice Sunday, put together by the Family Research Council. Graham said that "Dick Durbin and I are probably polar opposites in politics… but I've never questioned his faith." He added that he is "uncomfortable" questioning another Senator's "motives and faith." When prompted by Wallace, he added that he doesn't think Frist will do this if he handles himself properly. Then why did he say it?

Wallace asked Durbin, but the audio feed died. There were the minority whip's lips flapping with no sound. Graham laughed and quipped: "This is a magic moment in television."

Durbin's sound was restored, and he announced that faith can play no part in judicial decisions and that the Family Research Council is "entirely too political."

Graham called on the President to come out with a "complete plan" on Social Security, with both private accounts and solvency. Durbin said that private accounts cost a lot of money about which no one tells you, and that they do not work.

TONY PERKINS ON FNS. Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council was host Wallace's next guest. He said that a nominee's religion should not be a disqualification from serving on a court, and Wallace acknowledged that Chuck Schumer had a religious disqualification for then-nominee William Pryor.

Perkins called for an up-or-down vote for the nominees and stated that the courts have been "setting public policy, shaping culture, for forty years."

"The judiciary," he added, "is not above the law. They must be held accountable." He didn't specify what he meant by this, and they lost his audio shortly thereafter.

DODD AND MCCONNELL ON FTN. On CBS's Face the Nation, Bob Schieffer talked with GOP Senate whip Mitch McConnell and Senator Chris Dodd (D-Connecticut) about John Bolton, and the filibuster and the rule change, going on for so long that they couldn't fit in any harping on Tom DeLay. (Schieffer apologized for this.)

Schieffer complained that British Foreign Minister Jack Straw had evidently complained about John Bolton. Chris Dodd brushed that off and said that the real problem is that "there needs to be a firewall between policy and intelligence [analysis]." He asserted that Bolton had violated this firewall by attempting to fire intelligence analysts whose product to not conform with his policy choices.

Schieffer admonished Republicans for complaining that the Dems were politicizing the Bolton nomination when it was really Republicans -- Voinovich, Hagel, Chafee, Murkowski -- who were politicizing the process.

McConnell noted that "we're not nominating anyone for Miss Congeniality." He added that the U.N. "is in trouble," citing Oil for Food as an example, and John Bolton needs to be there to help fix it. He further pointed out that, contrary to what has been played by the MSM, not one Republican Senator has announced opposition to Bolton.

Schieffer declared that Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) was angry with Bolton for chasing a woman around a Moscow hotel, berating her. McConnell call this an "unsubstantiated rumor."

Doyle McManus of the Los Angeles Times, along for the questioning, told McConnell that the President will look bad if Bolton is not confirmed, and that he, as whip, should be telling the Republicans this. (The reporter is giving whip lessons, it seems.) McConnell predicted unanimous GOP support for Bolton.

When asked, Dodd said he does not know about a possible Democrat filibuster of Bolton, but that Bolton "brings too much heavy ideology to this."

Schieffer declared that, as Secretary of State, Colin Powell "kept Bolton in the corner there," where he could bother no one.

McConnell opined, "It's about time somebody went to the U.N. with a bit of skepticism." Dodd replied that Bolton was not the only Republican who could go to the U.N. and do what they want Bolton to do. He said that "everybody agrees" that Bolton has interpersonal skills. McConnell challenged him by insisting that not everyone agrees to this.

Dodd suggested the possibility of Bolton's confirmation, though not rosily: "He'll have a difficult time serving if confirmed."

Schieffer: "Let's take a break, and we'll come back and talk about filibusters."

Dodd: "Good."

Back, Schieffer outlined that the Republicans would change the rule and the Democrats would shut down the Senate. He asked McConnell: "Is this really going to happen? Is Frist really going to do this?" The question, of course, promotes the Democrat line from last week, that it will be the Republicans who will shut down the Senate if they change the rule.

McConnell explained that they were merely returning the Senate to how it treated judicial nominations prior to the last Congress.

Schieffer asked if McConnell had the votes to do that. McConnell said that they will, and Schieffer asked for clarification: they will, or do they now have votes?

McConnell replied: "Look, I never announce my whip count." But he said that they now have the votes to change the rule. That means at least 50 Senators, with the Veep as the 51st vote.

Dodd warned to "be careful what you wish for." Someday, he said, a Democrat President with a Democrat Congress will run through judges to offend Southerners. He added that the rules should not be changed: "We're only custodians of this institution."

McConnell chuckled at the rhetoric. "They changed the rules of the game," he said, recalling a 2001 summit at which the Democrats sat down with such Constitutional luminaries as Larry Tribe to discuss changing the rules now that they were in the minority.

BIDEN AND KYL ON TW. On ABC's This Week, host George Stephanopoulos spoke with Senators John Kyl (R-Arizona) and Joe Biden (D-Delaware).

"Can Bolton survive these accusations?"

Senator Kyl told Steph that he was "absolutely not" one of the Republicans wavering on Bolton. He said that every Republican on the committee, he thought, was ready to vote Bolton out of committee but one (Voinovich), who hadn't been at Bolton's hearings and wanted to catch up before casting his vote.

Joe Biden said that analysts told Bolton that Cuba did not have nuclear weapons, Bolton wanted to say that anyway, so he tried to have the analyst fired. Senator Kyl said that this was "absolutely false," and that Bolton did not try to have anyone fired. The analyst had lied to John Bolton and Bolton asked that he not have to work with him.

Biden said that this was why he didn't like doing the Sunday shows, because it looked like "these two politicians" were calling each other liars. "Let's look at the facts." He talked about a matter of insubstantial relevance and asserted that Bolton should have had to work with the guy who lied to him because the guy was suited only for that particular job.

Steph said that Colin Powell had contacted Republican Senators with his opinion on Bolton, and that this was so because the New York Times and Washington Post had said so. Senator Kyl said that just because they said so, doesn't make it so. He told Steph that the Senators had called Powell and Powell gave his opinion.

Biden said that British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw had asked Colin Powell to remove Bolton from the Libya case because he couldn't work with him.

Biden declared that there was a filibuster against Judge Fortas that lasted for 24-hours over a period a five days. He declared that the Dems had confirmed 205 of the 215 nominees the President had sent to the Senate.

Biden divided the rejected nominees into two categories: the three who were rejected "because of a Michigan fight," and the seven others, whom he called "radicals."

He assailed Judge Janice Rogers Brown, daughter of an Alabama sharecropper, for criticizing socialists and the New Deal, and for questioning whether or not there is a Constitutional basis for Medicare.

Kyl pointed out that the American Bar Association had rated all these judges as qualified. "They deserve an up-or-down vote."

Steph brought up David Broder's compromise: Give the judges up-or-down votes provided that the President makes no more recess appointments and the Senate leadership allows for extensive floor debate on each nominee. Biden dismissed this out of hand and proposed his own compromise: Of the seven judges not held up by Carl Levin and Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, let all go through "but the two most radical."

JOHN KING AND AHMED CHALABI. CNN's Chief National Correspondent John King subbed for Wolf Blitzer this afternoon, and he spoke with media darling Ahmed Chalabi, who is one of the folks involved in creating the Iraqi interim government.

Chalabi demanded a government "immediately," and said that the lack of a government was "encouraging the terrorists." (King told Chalabi that he had said that the lack of a government was "encouraging the insurgents.")

King challenged Chalabi about allowing Saddam's trained officers back into the security forces to get them "up and running" more quickly. Chalabi said that there are Sunnis who are not Ba'athists who can do the job, and he wants people who are both "loyal and competent" to do the "top jobs."

Should amnesty be given to the "insurgents"? King asked. Chalabi answered: "No amnesty for the terrorists." He called for a dialogue with anyone who has not engaged in terrorism and "reaching out to the Sunni community."

King asked if Chalabi would exclude only those who have killed Iraqis from the amnesty, as the answer would be important to the families of those Americans with family members in Iraq or killed in Iraq. Chalabi included those who have killed Iraqis and those who have killed "those invited by the Iraqi government."

King asked for a date certain when an Iraqi government would be set up. Chalabi said that negotiations are ongoing, and that "deadline will be met, and we'll have a Constitution in place."

King asked him what role he would play, and he said he didn't know. He talked about coming together and working out "important issues."

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It looks as if Senator Frist is ready to go with the rule change. With Bolton, we're going to be stuck with what Stephanopoulos called the "steady drip-drip-drip of allegations." The media will cover it and continue to tell us that more Republicans are wavering and the nomination looks doomed.

If Bolton's nomination fails, the President will look bad; if it succeeds, the MSM will look feeble. That's not what this is about, of course, but we shall worry about reforming the United Nations when he is confirmed.