Just this once, we wish that someone on the Meet The Press staff would read this column because someone there needs to know that today's program totally dropped the ball. Instead of discussing the important issues of the day, it was 40 minutes of political gossip about New Jersey Governor Chris Christie.
Is it an issue that should be one of the topics? Sure, but not for 40 minutes - simply ridiculous. And when the topic switched to Robert Gates' book, it was all about how 2016 presidential candidates will be effected.
Never mind that Iraq is disintegrating into a sectarian civil war that threatens to destabilize the entire region or that the jobs report for December was the weakest it's been in three years and Congress has decided not to extend unemployment benefits for 1.3 million U.S. citizens. How about the passing of Ariel Sharon and the legacy that his leadership of Israel, the United States' only true ally in the region, has left?
Yet, we have to hear the Republican National Committee Chairman, Reince Priebus, defend Governor Christie, not holding him accountable for his administration's actions while he hypocritically continued to bash President Obama - insufferable programming.
They didn't even really touch on the real reason the story matters. It wasn't a lane closing on a bridge. No, instead it was a lane closing on the busiest bridge in the world that leads to the biggest city in the United States that has already had to face terrorist attacks. That's what makes what the Christie administration did so despicable. On so many levels, they put general public safety at extreme risk for political purposes. Left out of today's conversation.
As 'Wall Street
Journal' Columnist Kim Strassel, and many others have said, he [Christie] better be telling the truth when he said that he didn't know anything about it. Regardless of whether Mr. Christie knew before Wednesday or not, he might as well take off the lap band because despite what Mr. Prebus would tell you, Mr. Christie's chances for becoming president of the United States are now close to zero.
The fact of the matter is that Mr. Christie did create a culture in his administration that would enable something like this to occur. We agree with Rick Santorum when he said that personnel is policy, and this completely puts into question Mr. Christie's judgement on who would run the country in a Christie Administration.
And getting back to the Robert Gates passive aggressive (Bloomberg View
columnist Jeffrey Goldberg's words) book for a moment, we haven't read it but that he's willing to dish with scorn on a sitting administration clearly illustrates in retrospect that he was not the right person for the job. The the discussed controversy about whether you interpret Mrs. Clinton's and Mr. Obama's stance on the troop surge in Iraq as political or not, it doesn't really matter because the surge should have never had to be decided upon in the first place if the Bush Administration didn't create the military folly that the Iraq War turned out to be.
And again, that Anbar province in Iraq is a de facto war zone, the memories of over 1,300 U.S. soldiers have been dishonored because with conditions as they are now, one is compelled to ask, 'What was the point in the first place?'
We would have really have liked to get all the guests take on that question, but it's not gossipy enough.
Round Table 1: Democratic Mayor of Baltimore Stephanie Rawlings-Blake; Wall Street
Journal Columnist Kim Strassel; former White House Press Secretary
Robert Gibbs; NBC News Chief White House Correspondent and Political
Director, Chuck Todd; and TIME Magazine's Mark Halperin.
Round Table 2: former Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), now president of the Wilson Center;
Former GOP Presidential Candidate Rick Santorum; Bloomberg View
columnist Jeffrey Goldberg; and host of MSNBC's Hardball, Chris
Matthews.
End Note: The topic that have taken more center stage should have been Maria Shriver's story of how 1 in 3 women in the United States is in economic peril and one big bill away from financial ruin. We'd talk more about this but at this point today, we're so cynical about the topics covered today that we have concluded that the only reason it was discussed at all was to plug programming, The Shriver Report.
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