Reality is — unfortunately for the Bush Team — ideology-free.The New York Times’ “conservative” David Brooks and “liberal” Thomas Freidman reacted to clips shown by host Tim Russert on Meet the Press Sunday. The spots were of the First Lady and former Defense Secretary again bemoaning that the media doesn’t report on all the good things happening in Iraq.
Tim Russert: “What do you think?”
Brooks: “Get off of it!
“We’ve got a hero in our newspaper, John Burns, another hero, Dexter Filkins, a whole series of heroes over there. They’re not biased about this. They want the best for the Iraqi people, they want democracy. Listen to what they’re reporting. They’re reporting chaos. You have a hundred — I don’t know what it is — 1.6 million people leaving Iraq. You’ve got 9,000 Iraqis every week who are moving to the Shiia homeland or the Sunni homeland. This is a country…It’s not civil war, it’s just disintegration.
“So the idea that this is just some media concoction…I said that a year ago, two years ago, but at some point you have to face reality.”
Freidman: …The problem is, when you hear the First Lady, when you think of the way Bush is running this war, he thinks that in the Middle East, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. It’s all straight, it’s a matter of just add a little more force here and you know, give another speech there. [Speaking slowly] It’s insane.
“I wanted this to suceed, you how, as much as anybody. Alright? Because I thought it was really important. I thought it was really important and really hard. And to me, what history will damn these people for is they thought it was really important and really easy.”
