I'm watching Countdown on MSNBC with Alison Stewart (yup, Keith Olbermann is on vacation) and Richard Wolffe is at it again. I am so very sick of this guy.
Wolffe is Newsweek's Senior White House Correspondent. He's frequently on Countdown as their "political analyst." Tonight, Ms. Stewart interviewed him about the confrontation between the President and Congress over troop funding.
Paraphrasing,
Wolffe: Both sides look ridiculous.
Stewart: You don't think either side has any political advantage here?
Wolffe: No, not really.
To Ms. Stewart's credit, she quickly supplied current polling data showing that a majority of the American people support Harry Reid's position. But in Wolffe's universe, Congress and the President are two bratty children fighting over a toy -- and both are equally at fault.
The MSNBC site doesn't have tonight's transcript up yet, but here's a similar exchange from April 18 (emphasis mine):
OLBERMANN: Richard, politically, for whatever Congress may do, may not do about funding, time lines, et cetera, deadlines, pull outs, are the lives and deaths of those kids there, many of the same ages, same aspirations as the kids at Virginia Tech who died yesterday, some of them in the Army to put themselves through college. Have the deaths been taken out of the political equation? Have even the war‘s opponents de-emphasized the individual tragedies of military deaths?
WOLFFE: I do not think people see them as individuals, which is sad. Some of the home town newspapers do, and that‘s the right way to treat it, but look at the debate now about who is going to play this game of chicken, who is going to blink first on the spending, the time lines, the deadlines.
And again, even more blatantly, on April 10 (this, following Sen. Levin's proclamation "We‘re going to send the bill back to him after he vetoes it, which he will sign, one way or another, because we‘re not going to jeopardize the funding for the troops."):
OLBERMANN: Let‘s work backwards. Did the president just win the fight over the funding bill?
WOLFFE: Yes, he did, and he always was going to win it, because, in the end, he has the votes to overturn the veto—or rather, he has the votes to protect his veto. And the Democrats are in a position where they want to talk tough, but they‘re essentially in a weak situation, where they prefer to stand up to their own antiwar base than they prefer to stand up to the president. So they‘re always going to blink.
OLBERMANN: Why did they blink, why did they cave right now? Why not wait at least till they were back in session or until the president actually did veto the funding?
WOLFFE: Well, this is the unilateral disarmament aspect of this, and it‘s a problem for them, because, again, they‘ve talked tough, but they‘ve behaved in a weaker way.
The difficult thing, though, is for Democrats that they don‘t want to have to own this war. They‘re much happier talking about the president‘s failings, about leaving it as his policy, rather than saying, This is something we have an idea of what to do with. There are no good ideas about how to get out of Iraq, and leaving precipitously is going to cause all sorts of other problems. The Democrats don‘t want to own this problem, they want to leave it with the president.
OLBERMANN: All right. Turning to Iraq per se . . .
Bear in mind, these guys are on our side. I think. And while I love me some Olbermann, I wish he wouldn't cave quite so readily to the "Democrats are weak" meme.
I mean REALLY. "Why did they blink, why did they cave right now?" doesn't hold up in light of Sen. Reid's subsequent actions -- and the likely actions of Congress as a whole.
I know Keith Olbermann and other MSNBC blokes check out Daily Kos on occasion. I'm hoping this diary might help get the message across: one Senator making wishy-washy statements does not equate with Congress blinking. The battle isn't over yet.