Frank Rich (NYT): Are You Now or Have You Ever Been in the Situation Room?

[Dudley_DUright]

In comedy, as in politics, timing is everything. You have to wonder just what George W. Bush was thinking on the night of Wednesday, March 24, when he decided to do stand-up at the end of the most gripping day of 9/11 television since 9/11 itself.

That afternoon had brought Richard Clarke's testimony before the 9/11 commission, a classic piece of Washington committee-room theater. Mr. Clarke's mea culpa — "Your government failed you, those entrusted with protecting you failed you and I failed you" — is likely to join our history's greatest-hits video reel, alongside Joseph Welch's "Have you no sense of decency, sir?," Howard Baker's "What did the president know, and when did he know it?" and Clarence Thomas's "high-tech lynching." That evening, Tom Brokaw, generally the least contentious (and most watched) of the three network anchors, took the startling step of giving Condoleezza Rice the first hard slap of her heretofore charmed life in the public eye: "Dr. Rice, with all due respect, I think a lot of people are watching this tonight, saying: `Well, she can appear on television, write commentary, but she won't appear before the commission under oath. It just doesn't seem to make sense.' " As indeed it did not, to anyone.

Was this the best night for the president to do a comedy routine touching on his administration's failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? Maybe you had to be in the hall — an annual black-tie dinner for broadcast journalists in Washington — as I was not. But as Howard Dean learned in Iowa, it's only how you come across on TV that matters in America, not what it feels like in the moment. On TV, Mr. Bush's jocular slide show, in which he is seen searching for Saddam's arsenal in the Oval Office, proved an unwanted bookend to Mr. Clarke's opening act. A nation of viewers that had watched a public servant mourn the unnecessary loss of American life on 9/11 now saw the president make light of the rationale that necessitated the sacrifice of an additional 500-plus Americans (so far) in the war fought in 9/11's name.

There will be many more such whipsaw days of television to come. This drama has legs. It is hurtling toward September 2004, when Mr. Bush appears at the Republican convention in New York against an implicit, and possibly literal, ground zero backdrop. For reasons that are rarely unselfish, everyone wants to own a piece of 9/11. Whether it's TV ads that invoke the ruins and corpses of the World Trade Center to sell the Bush-Cheney campaign or a short-lived effort by MBNA (coincidentally or not, the biggest Bush contributor in 2000) to market a "Spirit of America" MasterCard picturing the ground zero firemen hoisting the flag, power and money are at stake, not just our security.

more...

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/04/arts/04RICH.html

[Daisey Mae]

1. Frank Rich is thoughtful and Correct as always...

He is cutting through the B.S. on this subject and reinforcing the claims AGAINST the" lying bunch,,"