I used to think Don Imus was a great interviewer because he would challenge people in a way that nobody else would. Those days are long gone and I am not sure why.
Mary Matalin was on this morning and probably because they are friends, he lets her talk the biggest BS on earth. She's made statements on his show like, it's unfair to seek perjury charges against Scooter Libby because he DISREMEMBERRED that he told reporters about Valerie Plame and Iraq is a success, it's not a failure, it's a success that hasn't happened yet. Today, instead of challenging her on this increase of 20,000 troops to Iraq, he talked about who in the Administration would not act like a man the way Saddam Hussein did, if they were to be executed and he kept on asking her if she knew Montgommery Gentry. He also talked about an op-ed Mike Lupica wrote in today's New York Daily News and that is quoted below.
Then Bob Schieffer came on and Schieffer was good. He first spoke about the promise that was broken to the all volunteer army, making them stay in a battle zone way past for what they signed on. So, what does Imus say? He said, I can relate to that because he was supposed to be out of MSNBC a month ago and Joel Hollander (and others..he loves to name drop) made him sign on for another 5 years. Schieffer was getting frustrated, to say the least, but nobody tells Imus to stop the shit about himself and conduct a meaningful interview. They become parasites on that show.
Imus then spoke about the special hospital being built in Houston for retuning soldiers who have lost limbs. Schieffer wanted to move that discussion along with the fact that that hospital should have been built by the Federal Government and that is just another failure of the Bush Administration's pact with the "men in the field." So, does Imus continue with Schieffer, no he protects Bush by talking about himself and how much money he raised and how much he gave and how he had to beg is friends for $10 million dollars?
About the Lupica article, where Imus' good friend, sports columnist Mike Lupica wrote in what appears to be an op-ed essay in the New York Daily News entitled G.I. deserves a reason why http://www.nydailynews.com/...
He comes out of upstate New York and put himself through college with ROTC, and found himself with the 1st Armored Division in Baghdad in the summer of 2003 fighting George W. Bush's war. He spent 15 months in Iraq and now they want to send him back in the spring, make him part of this great surge that we will hear about from the White House tonight, one that is less about saving what is left of Iraq than it is saving what is left of this President's reputation.
Lupica is then not afraid to admit this:
This is all about the men and women running one of the worst and weakest administrations in American history trying to save face now.
Lupica protects the soldiers name and quotes him,
"And now they want to send us back, and keep sending us back, and for what? I see now that Bush wants to send 20,000 more troops, which is supposed to include me, and I want to know why?
The soldier is obviously torn as he says,
"I don't know what I'm going to do," ....
Because those [strategies] have never been defined, not for the people on the ground, and for that I don't believe I can continue to support this lunacy."
Lupica concludes,
The President will offer another plan for Iraq tonight, in an endless series of them. He will attempt to justify the death of 3,000 American men and women and the wounding of 10,000 more, some of them the worst wounded any war has ever produced. Finally, he is expected to talk about sending more over there, sending more young Americans to get their asses shot off as a way of covering his own.
So Imus says, he doesn't believe the president would ask for the surge and risk the lives of so many more of our soldiers just to save face. How useless has he become?
I have been staying away from the Imus in the Morning lately, except for today, and instead I've been putting on ESPN radio's Mike and Mike and that has been a lot more satisfying! I wish somebody could get Imus to be the great interviewer he once was. Maybe if he would stop kissing so much Republican ass, and attack them for the lowlifes they are, he'd do a lot better. Most of his criticisms of Republicans are camouflaged with jokes or how he thinks that Bush really cares.