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By Mark Kilmer Posted in Elections — Comments (5) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Joint Chiefs chairman General Richard Myers was on both FNS and FTN, and he was in good spirits on both shows. (Schieffer thinks we're fighting another, distant war.)

Chris Dodd proved that the wattage need not be high in order to be elected to the U.S. Senate with a good political name for the State you wish to represent. (Leave Linc Chafee out of this!)

Specter and Brownback seemed ready to "take this outside" on Steph's show. John McCain said he'll start his bus when he's darned good and ready.

Read on for the review…

RICHARD MYERS ON FNS. Joint Chiefs Chairman General Richard Myers was host Chris Wallace's first guest on FOX News Sunday this morning, and he said that "we tend to believe" the Islamic message board which reported that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was injured, though he backed away from specifying that the terrorist was injured badly.

General Myers said that Operation Lightning, in which 40,000 Iraq troops are hunting insurgents in Baghdad, is "an important step in the journey" towards Iraqi control of their own security. The important thing, he stressed, is that the Interior Ministry and the Ministry of Defense are cooperating closely. The "working together" bit seems to have been a concern going in.

The General reminded viewers that the insurgents first unsuccessfully went after the coalition troops, then moved on to goiafter those Iraqis who volunteered for the security services. When that didn't work, they went after the Iraqi civilians, who voted anyway and according to polls are ready to vote on the Constitution. Nothing has working for them, so that is a sign of the coalition's success, he ventured.

Wallace pointed out that Amnesty International has accused the United States of running a gulag of torture and deprivation at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Myers challenged the organization "to go look up the definition of 'gulag,' as it is commonly used." He pointed out that we are spending $2.5 million to assure that the Islamic prisoners have proper Islamic food. We are giving them copies of the Koran in thirteen languages. The respect for the religion and culture of the prisoners is unprecedented, he said, and of AI's charges: "I think it's irresponsible. I think it's absolutely irresponsible."

Myers steered clear of the Saddam-in-his-briefs photos, saying that it was completely out of his area of expertise. He did the same with the question of whether or not Joe Biden should be given top secret intercepts regarding John Bolton.

CHRIS DODD ON FNS. - Wallace next talked to Senator Chris Dodd (D-Connecticut), the Senator who added his name to Joe Biden's in creating the filibuster against the nomination of John Bolton to be United States Ambassador to the U.N. Dodd says he wants docs.

Wallace asked him if this filibuster risked destroying the bipartisan comity which was supposed to have been created by the McCain-Byrd compromise on judicial nominees. Dodd suggested that it "shouldn't jeopardize anything." He expressed regret that the "Republican leadership" in the Senate had seen fit to schedule the Bolton vote on the heels of the judicial compromise, saying that he would have preferred waiting until after the recess. He accused the "Republican leadership" of scheduling the vote when he did because he thought the Democrats would let Bolton pass without argument.

Dodd said he hopes the Senate "can be creative" and work something out "for the Senate to get the names we need." He said that the only people who need to see the 19 top secret names on the 10 intercepts are the chairman and ranking Democrat on Senate Intelligence -- Pat Roberts and Jay Rockefeller -- and the chairman and ranking Dem on Senate Foreign Relations, Dick Lugar and Joe Biden. He, Chris Dodd, doesn't need personally to see them.

They need to know the names, Dodd insisted, because Bolton might have tried to have these 19 people fired: "There's a pattern of behavior which fits a pattern."

Wallace: "This is a fishing expedition."

Dodd: "It's not a fishing expedition. We're a coequal branch of government. …. We're just doing our job."

Dodd then maintained that this has something to do with the claim that Syria had weapons of mass destruction.

Perhaps he ought to go back to cutting bait.

TIM RUSSERT SCARES PEOPLE. This weeks Meet the Press on NBC was designed, it seems, to fill time and frighten people. Host Tim Ruessert spoke with Dick Lugar, Sam Nunn, Fred Thompson, Tom Kean, and Lee Hamilton about terrorists getting nukes. They established that Osama bin Laden wants a nuke and it would be a disaster if he gets one, which is absolutely nothing new.

Kean and Hamilton will bring the old 9-11 Commission gang together again beginning June 6, to grade the government’s progress in implementing its designs, with its report card due July 25. The 9-11 Commission just will not go away and leave us alone.

GENERAL MYERS ON FTN. General Myers was Bob Schieffer's guest on CBS's Face the Nation. Schieffer asked him for the "state of the military," and was told that the state of the military was "very high, in terms of morale." Soldiers, Myers said, understand the importance of their "efforts against violent extremism."

Schieffer asked the general if he thought Iraq were "on the verge of civil war." Myers said it wasn't close: "I think a lot of aspects are getting better." Challenged by Schieffer on how he could say such a thing, Myers pointed out that the insurgents cannot figure out whom to attack, nothing seems to be working. It was the same argument he laid out on FNS, and he called it "center of gravity."

"I think the trend lines are up."

Schieffer pointed out how many Americans had died since the Iraqi elections. Myers responded with thirty security operations ongoing of Iraqi initiative, the political engagement of the minority Sunnis, etc.

Schieffer asked General Myers for his personal opinion: "How did we get it so wrong?" Myers, while brushing off the "so wrong" bit, said that we underestimated just how badly the spirit of the Iraqi people had been crushed: "It wasn't just going to naturally blossom when give the opportunity."

Schieffer asked General Myers if we should have gone into Iraq with a larger force. Myers said that he personally didn't think so: "It's always a balance." How many forces are needed to do the job without being intimidating to the average Iraqi who would resent pure occupation.

After all these years, Schieffer still thinks we're in Vietnam. Or he's taking out his leftover Vietnam-inspired aggressions with a new war.

CHAIRMAN DAVIS ON FTN. Next, Schieffer talked to Chairman Tom Davis (R-Virginia) of the House Government Reform Committee about banning steroids in professional sports. "I think the votes are there," Davis admitted.

SPECTER AND BROWNBACK ON TW. Host George Stephanopoulos of ABC's This Week spoke with Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pennsylvania) and Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kansas) about federal funding of experiments on human embryonic stem cells. Of course, the debate was about the experimentation itself.

Specter said that the human embryos are not life, because "life does not occur until they are implanted in a woman." He said that there were a bunch of them frozen, so that when the President says that he will not spend federal money to take lives to save lives, "he is factually incorrect." Specter said we have two choices: use them to save lives or throw them away. He made no mention of using federal funds to conduct the experiments.

Brownback pointed out that other countries limit the number of embryos created for in vitro fertilization. "These are human lives…. They aren't medical waste." Steph interjected that unless they are implanted in a woman, they cannot start to become life. Brownback countered that we should work with that rather than wide scale experiments.

Specter declared that we need to adequately fund wars against diseases. He blamed Richard Nixon for not adequately funding the fight against Hodgkin's Lymphoma, with which he is dealing. He insisted that President Bush wants "to tie the hands of human research," which is incorrect. President Bush merely does not want to fund the research with taxpayers' money.

Brownback said that he's "been taught a lot of lesson from the Democrats recently," and has several ideas on preventing the federal funding legislation from coming to a vote in the Senate. Specter insisted that he ought not to be taking lessons from the Democrats, who were busy trying to block judicial nominees.

Brownback pointed out that human embryonic stem cells have produced no results, so we should concentrate on the adult cells. Specter countered that the embryonic stem cells were the only ones which would work. He said that his friend is dying of Parkinson's Disease, and that "there is evidence" that embryonic stem cell research would cure Parkinson's. Brownback countered that he knows a man who was cured with adult stem cells, and that no one should experiment on cells without permission of the owners.

Specter said that he's less concerned with when life begins than with life ends, and that life "does not start in the laboratory dish." Brownback said that if you asked the "Snowflake Babies," their lives wouldn't have existed if they had been destroyed has embryos.

If these two men lived on opposite sides of the political aisle, I fear they would have come to blows.

Steph pointed out that Specter couldn't get enough votes to override a veto. Specter insisted that there were more than signed the letter to Bill First who would vote to override, which is a fine thing for Arlen, as only six Senators signed that pro-funding letter. Specter added that when the American people understood this stem cell issue, there would be the largest march of Washington in history as angry voters demanded federal funding.

Steph wisely changed the subject to judicial nominations and "extraordinary circumstances." Brownback suggested that just because a nomination was to the Supreme Court does not make it an "extraordinary circumstance." Specter made his case for Judge William Myers, one of the Michigan nominees, and how he would be confirmed. (Myers and Henry Saad, another Michigan nominee, were excluded from the definite-vote provisions of The Deal last week. That Specter singled out Myers and did not mention Saad indicates that Saad's confirmation will be even more problematic.)

JOHN MCCAIN ON LE. The Maverick speaks. Host Wolf Blitzer interviewed Senator John McCain of Arizona, who discussed, in Blitzer's phrase, "critical issues swirling around Washington." McCain thinks the cost of the war -- lives and money -- is worth it, but that the American people should have been prepared better for what would happen. He stated that suicide bombers were the most difficult to combat, as they want to die.

McCain thinks we have enough troops now, but that we made "terrible and tragic mistakes" earlier by not having more, and we are "paying a deadly price for it now."

He has this stuff memorized!

He insisted that the Iraqis are too slow in forming a government and too slow in drafting a constitution. Blitzer asked him about the lack of Sunnis in the government and asked him about a Sunni-Shi'a civil war. McCain said that this is "what the insurgents are trying to foment," and he listed the countries from which they came.

McCain flatly rejected Blitzer's analogy between the U.S. in Iraq and the Soviets in Afghanistan, and he fingered the Syrians and the Saudis. He rejected a distinction between the Saudi government and the madrassas. He quoted the PRC's Chairman Mao, one of history's most evil men, using an analogy defeating insurgents by "drying up the lake."

McCain said that we had a problem with the "treatment of prisoners of war" everywhere and with all agencies of government. He thinks Congress should hold hearings about this issue to be certain they are exercising their oversight.

McCain said that the snaps of Saddam in his briefs were a violation of the Geneva Convention. Blitzer pointed out that McCain was a P.O.W., and McCain agreed. However, McCain said, he does not want to make his past a reason for talking about these things. He hopes that he is taken seriously on this issue because he is a U.S. Senator.

McCain said that Saddam did have WMD, that he had used them and wanted to acquire more, and that the sanctions had been achieving nothing. That being said, McCain intoned, we have to address our intelligence failure.

McCain expressed hope that The Deal on judicial nominees would awaken a new spirit of comity in the Senate, and that maybe other groups -- not necessarily that same Gang of Fourteen -- can come together in a new spirit of bipartisanship. (This interview was taped last Thursday.) Blitzer pointed out that McCain is being hammered by the far right, quoting James Dobson as saying that The Deal was a cave, and McCain mentioned that the far left is also rebelling. Blitzer insisted that only the far right was doing so, and that they had "smelled victory" on the nuclear option.

McCain said that the Senate was "designed to protect the rights of the minority," and he equated geographic minorities in population (in the States) with ideological minorities. He predicted that one day the Democrats would run the Congress and have a "liberal Democrat President."

McCain said that the Democrats are aware that they had abused their power to filibuster over the past several years.

McCain said he had not decided whether or not he was running for President. "I just don't want to do it," he said of deciding before he's ready to do so. Blitzer told him that everyone else was doing it. McCain was unfazed.

Blitzer showed a clip from the McCain flick, where McCain refused to be freed until his proper turn. Asked if it were accurate, McCain replied: "Totally accurate." Things did get worse, he was forced to give a "full war crimes confession," but he made it.

McCain praised forgiveness. He forgave Jane Fonda: "She said she's sorry." His captors had showed him clips of her, he said, and of Ramsey Clark, whom he holds "far more responsible for the mistreatment of American soldiers than some Hollywood actress."

ABDULLAH ABDULLAH ON LE. Blitzer spoke to the Afghan Foreign Minister, Abdullah Abdullah, a medical doctor who has been seen in Western suits except in formal Afghan ceremonies. He said that Osama in Laden is not in Afghanistan, but that he perhaps goes back and forth between Pakistan and Afghanistan. He refused to assert that OBL is Pakistan.

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Another week is in the can. Happy Memorial Day.