The Villagers seem to getting restless with standard GOP Talking Points.
Peggy Noonan has trouble selling her special brand of spin today, in the wake of current events.
How will the bombing affect business in Washington?
Meet the Press -- April 21, 2013
link to clip
Transcript over the jump ...
Automated MTP Transcript, with some corrections and annotations:
President Obama, video clip:
>> The world will return to this great American city to run harder than ever and to cheer even louder for the 118th Boston Marathon.
David Gregory:
>> The President speaking at the memorial service in Boston so movingly this week. Tom Brokaw, Washington is going to step up here. The President is going to be speaking to the country about terrorism, about securing the country. Questions about interrogating the suspect, whether he should be an enemy combatant or not, how we track home grown terror and, indeed, even our debates over guns and immigration potentially affected. What do you see?
Tom Brokaw:
>> Well, what I see is an opportunity for the American citizens to get involved in trying to do something about the culture of violence that has become such a large part of our lives, whether it's guns or this kind of an attack or whatever it is we are living with it. We're living with the violent video games, for example, that we see. I to think this is an opportunity to say I want to be part of that debate and I think that the president could help ignite that in a meaningful way and pull the country together. However you decide your voice ought to be heard in that debate, this is the time to have that debate. Here we are in the 21st century, the most advanced nation in the world, we have third-world vulnerabilities almost everywhere we go. Our kids are growing up in a way that none of us could have ever anticipated around this table when we were younger, about what kind of a card they have to wear to get into school, the fear they may go into a classroom and get shot up by somebody or a movie theater. That's outrageous for an advanced country like the United States without having some kind of a national dialogue about it and putting it at the head of the agenda, in my judgment.
David Gregory:
>> And yet this week as this was going on, as the investigation was going on, the Senate defeats the background check bill for guns. So we are confronting this violence but still very divided about how we react to it and try to solve it.
Peggy Noonan:
>> Yeah, I think the essential problem is that Americans at this point don't trust their government so much to do the right thing. They are skeptical of all Bills on things that they care about to lower the conversation a little bit, get it down to mere politics, I guess. I think there is a problem when you've got 90% of the American people wanting something like background checks and a President who is just re-elected and riding a wave, can't make anything move that way. I think there is a problem there, and I think he is having, as somebody said, a problem with the levers of power.
Doris Kearns Goodwin:
>> Maybe the problem is also the structure of the Senate. At the turn of the 20th century when public sentiment wanted a lot of things done to deal with industrialization and the problem of the slums, the senate was impossible it to move because it was millionaires in there. They finally realized they have to have direct election of Senators. They used to be elected by the state legislators and they were only susceptible to special interest. [Noonan's look is priceless here, if looks could kill ...] Maybe that's the problem given the 60 votes needed, given who they listen to, given the power of special interest, public sentiment cannot penetrate. We've seen it for the last decade. That's what the dysfunction is about, it's not just the Senate, it's the Congress.
Peggy Noonan:
>> But did Majority Leader Harry Reid follow the President? Do you know what I mean, something is not working there. Yeah.
Tom Brokaw:
>> But in those States in which the Senators voted against the background checks, it's not even close to 90% in terms of wanting it. It's probably down in single digits in Montana and Arkansas and Alaska and North Dakota, the States that block it are Democrats, so you have to take that into consideration.
Peggy Noonan:
>> Yeah but when you got a town like Newtown, 90% move it. Small, discreet parts of a bill, push it through. Call it a victory. Keep going.
Tom Brokaw:
>>Well Kill the Filibuster Bill. I mean, or change it.
Doris Kearns Goodwin:
>> Definitely!
Kudos to Kearns Goodwin for addressing the elephant in the room -- the Filibuster and Lobbyists.
Kudos to Brokaw for backing her up about the Filibuster, and for addressing the effect of drones on the "root causes" of the terrorist mindset, in an earlier segment:
Tom Brokaw:
>> I think there's something else that goes beyond the event that we've all been riveted by in the last week. We have to work a lot harder at the motivation here. What prompts a young man to come to this country and still feel alienated from it, to go back to Russia and do whatever he did did? I don't think we've examined that enough. There was 24/7 coverage on television, a lot of newspaper print and so on, but we have to look at the roots of all this. Because it exists across the whole subcontinent, in the Islamic world around the world. And I think we also have to examine the use of drones, that the United States is involved in; and there are a lot of civilians that are innocently killed in a drone attack in Pakistan, in Afghanistan, and in Iraq. And I can tell you having spent a lot of time over there, young people will say
We love America. If you harm one hair on the head of my sister, I will fight you forever.
And there is this enormous rage against, what they see in that part of world, as the presumptuousness of the United States.
David Gregory:
>> And the portal is so clear, to act on that rage or to build on it, to further educate it.
[...]
[PS. Given the many "key phrases" I had to fill back in to the transcript, I'll have to revise my thinking that these are "automated" through some sort of computer voice-recognition app. It seems clear to me after today's exercise in editing,
that some human is picking and choosing what phrases to transcribe and/or otherwise summarize, or on occasion ignore altogether.]
The Villagers when they speak up against the Village-keeper madness, often have their transcribed thoughts and words, abruptly cut. Hmmm?
Could it be, the Village-keepers are getting restless, too?