I also am surprised that Kerrey stooped to the level of political grandstanding that he did, and I forgot to mention the most irksome (other any of the seeping idiocy that oozed from Ben Veniste) part of the Rice testimony:
KERREY: Let me move to another area.
RICE: May I finish answering your question though because this is an important point.
KERREY: I know it’s important. Everything that’s going on here is important but I’ve got 10 minutes.
RICE: But since we have a point of disagreement I’d like to have a chance to address it.
KERREY: Actually, we have many points of disagreement, Dr. Clarke. We’ll have a chance to do in closed session. You can’t – please don’t filibuster me. It’s not fair. It is not fair. I have been polite. I have been courteous. It is not fair to me. I understand that we have a disagreement.
RICE: Commissioner, commissioner, I am here to answer questions. And you’ve asked me a question.
Silly Ms. Rice. You aren’t here to answer questions- you are here for election year political posturing.
I never thought my opinion of Democrats could get lower, but they always manage to out-do themselves.
*** Update ***
Jeff Goldstein offers up this nugget:
The most interesting fact about yesterday’s Condolezza Rice testimony before the 9/11 commission? Of the 25000 or so words exchanged, Ms. Rice — whom the commission insisted needed to testify publically lest Truth be throttled — spoke only 15000 of those words, or sixty percent. The other forty percent of the time, television audiences were treated to Bob Kerrey throwing a salty, context-challenged testosterfit, or to Richard Ben Veniste attempting to play headline gotcha like some bitter, nerdy hall monitor avenging a G. Gordon Liddy wedgie.
Gary Farber
If the White House hadn’t limited her appearance to two hours, this wouldn’t have happened. It should have been at least eight hours, or, really, as long as it took.
But who limited the time? Who deserves the blame for that?
Mason
It is the fault of the White House that Bob Kerrey went off on some Iraq tangent and then whined about not having enough time?
Kimmitt
“Permission to treat the witness as hostile, your Honor.”
Jason
Maybe Dr. Rice should have just said, “Yes masa, no masa”, eh? Now that would have made Bob “War Criminal” Kerry look tough, eh?
RB
How good is that for Democrat PR? Watching a group of white democrat males “lashing” a black female?
shark
Who deserves the blame for that? Hey, Bush would’ve ben right not to have Dr. Rice testify, or for him not to cooperate in any way with a commission that the Dems had already made public their plans to politicize and use to their advantage
JC
I’m new to this site – I don’t know if this site and posters are as far out as LGF territory, so I’ll post a little bit, to find out if reasoned discourse goes on here, but from a conservative perspective – disagreements welcomed…
The thing that has been really hurting the administration here, I think, is there stonewalling of various incriminating information.
I don’t think the Republican or the Democratic administration did what it could of, regarding the war on terror, prior to 9-11. It was just one priority among many – and without something like 9-11, people just go on with their business. So attempting to “blame” 9-11 on the incoming administration, or the previous administration, is incredibly couter-productive in my view.
Nevertheless – the stonewalling of this administration is rather breathtaking.
The name of that August PDB? ” Bin Laden determined to Attack inside the United State.” You know, what, this clearly does not look good. But to spend two years attempting to stall the release of this information? The “cover-up” is always worse than the crime, and makes it look really bad.
Can I get some agreement on that?
John Cole
I would agree with you to a certain extent.
Kimmitt
Ah, well. Sen. Kerrey criticized the President, so it’s time to add him to the list of “people who, if they criticize the President, are no longer credible.”
norbizness
Fielding’s opening statement before asking a question: 460 words.
Lehman’s opening statement before asking a question: 400 words.
Thompson’s opening statement before asking a question: 400 words.
Don’t ask me, I don’t know what it proves.
StuckInOregon
No matter how you look at it, with it being a political year the dems and the repubs are going to do everything that they can to make their candidate look like the golden boy of the hour. They got Dr. Rice to testify in public but yet Clinton and Gore were both in Private. This commission is a big grandstand and nothing will come out of it. Now that the Dem’s excuse me Progressives have their talking heads who have learned to spin the testimony to their point of view. It is actually getting fun to see who said what.
norbizness
BTW, bonus points if you can guess the speaker of the following quote:
“Richard Benveniste is a magnificent trial lawyer and you saw a good trial lawyer’s cross-examination of a witness. I wasn’t offended by it. He had a perfect right to answer those questions, and Condoleezza Rice didn’t bend under them.”
John Cole
It was Kean or Lehman- also members of the commission.
Patrick
JC,
What stonewalling? The commission, or Salem Republican Trial as it shall be known in the future, already had FOUR HOURS of Rice testimony. They already knew everything they heard on Thursday and more. It was nothing more than political gotcha, for the cameras. Solely because this is an election year.
And I don’t agree in any manner that more could have been done in the pre-911 mindset to prevent it. You’re looking at all of the evidence with knowledge of what happened, perfect 20/20 hindsight.
They let Rice publicly testify – setting a precedent. They have released a confidential PDB – another precedent. What stonewalling?
So I disagree with almost everything you said, but I was civil and didn’t call you any names. OK? Happy Easter!
Andrew J. Lazarus
You know Patrick, when you-all got the Secret Service to testify where they’re stationed in and about the Oval Office, the better to imoeach Clinton, that too was completely unprecedented. But when something critical like the nation’s penis is at stake, you’ve got to bend the rules.
Now we see the PDB. No wonder Rice had to *unsay* some of her earlier conversation. Contra her erstwhile defense, we had a pretty darn good idea hijackings were in the air (you do recall Ashcroft stopped flying commercial). And we also see that our super-secret PDBs they went so far to protect have the analytical quality of a second-line blog.
Fat Cracker
“Ah, well. Sen. Kerrey criticized the President, so it’s time to add him to the list of “people who, if they criticize the President, are no longer credible.”
No Kermit, Sen. Kerrey was a uncredible closet jagoff waaaayyy before he ever critized the President. Sen. Bob is just making sure that the views of the stupid and feeble-minded are adequately represented within the 9/11 commission and that their valued opinions , which obviously have been ignored for far too long, are equally held forth. And being the smartest man on the commission Sen Kerrey just could not allow Ben Veniste to be the sole standard bearer for that much maligned constituency. For that principled stand I say huzzah, Sen. Kerrey, huzzah!
Fat Cracker
that should be “criticized the President.” One should never post at 4:30 in the morning after a night of consuming adult beverages while listening to the blues live without a designated lincensed spellchecker.
MommaBear
The most insulting and demeaning thing out of that pair of publicity hounds: calling her Dr. Clarke several times. Shows they’ve not too many brain cells between them, doesn’t it.
Patrick
Andrew,
Yeah, sorry about that penis thing. Was a damn shame that your hero was schtupping the intern, lied about it, and got caught. But since he was ONLY the president, we can let it go. If it was somebody less important, say a Senator with an (R) after his name, you’d have called for bypassing the impeachment and going direct to the firing squad.
As for Ashcroft being counseled by the FBI that there was a threat assessment and advised not to fly commercial airlines, that was published by CBS in July. Of 2001. You know, that national news organization that employs the nonpartisan Dan Rather? So it was public knowledge. We don’t know what that threat assessment was, just that there was one and the AG acted within “guidelines” set by the FBI. I guess we can assume that it was aviation-related. The non-specific wording of the August PDB would indicate something along the same line.
There are threats assessed all the time. They now cause the terror alert status to rise and lower, which y’all probably bitch and moan about. If the color coding had been in effect in the summer of 2001, would it have made you any happier or safer?
It still all amounts to a hill of nothing but politicians blowing hard, what they specialize in. I count both sides of the aisle on this. They’re far more interested in getting serious video of their face than actually doing something.
Personally, I feel a tiny bit safer knowing that Saddam isn’t out there selling whatever he had to people who want to park in my driveway and set it off. It doesn’t mean there aren’t already people planning to do same, but one source has been eliminated. Not necessarily safe, but safer. I used to practice duck and cover in gradeschool, so a little uneasyness is something I’ve grown up with.
Patrick
Oh, and I’ve read the transcript of that PDB pretty carefully and I don’t see anything about hijacking multiple airliners and crashing them into buildings. I believe the most specific thing is in the third paragraph from the end: “some of the more sensational threat reporting, such as that from a —- service in 1998 saying that Bin Laden wanted to hijack a U.S. aircraft to gain the release of “Blind Sheikh” Omar Abdel Rahman and other U.S.-held extremists.”
So the worst case scenario (“some of the more sensational threat reporting”) in that PDB was that BinLaden would cause the traditional for-ransom hijacking to exchange for prisoners.
So if I read as you probably do, that means that Bush planned the whole 9/11 thing, in cooperation with OBL via satellite phone contact. An occasional intermediary was AG Ashcroft, flying in his Gulfstream at 109,000 feet to enhance his communications ability, which is why he stopped flying commercial.
Tongue Boy
“Richard Benveniste is a magnificent trial lawyer and you saw a good trial lawyer’s cross-examination of a witness. I wasn’t offended by it. He had a perfect right to answer those questions, and Condoleezza Rice didn’t bend under them.”
I don’t know who said this but I do know that the 9/11 commission was not supposed to be a trail.
Operative word: was…
dg
“KERREY: Actually, we have many points of disagreement, Dr. Clarke. We’ll have a chance to do in closed session. You can’t – please don’t filibuster me. It’s not fair. It is not fair. I have been polite. I have been courteous. It is not fair to me. I understand that we have a disagreement.”
Here we see the left attempt to create a new McCarthy. Any bets on whether they will be successful?
Kimmitt
Prolly not; it’s likely that we’ll win the next election and nail about half of the current Republican leadership on various violations of FEC and other Federal laws, which will (hopefully) lead to a Republican Party lead by conservatives who are not crooks, fools, and/or theocrats.