Condoleezza Rice smacks down Lawrence O'Donnell

I respectfully disagree. The only thing I can think of is you agree with his position and the end justify the means?

CinnamonGirl wrote: I respectfully disagree. The only thing I can think of is you agree with his position and the end justify the means?

No, as I said earlier I couldn't even focus on the content because there was such a power struggle going on. It was the meta-content that caught my attention.

She knows what she's talking about?

Last night, during a contentious interview with Bush Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell wondered if Saddam Hussein “was the same threat to New Yorkers that Osama bin Laden was.” With the obvious answer being, “No,” Rice had to come up with something. Similar to President Bush’s “You forgot Poland” line during the 2004 presidential debate, Rice said the threat from, and thus invasion of, Iraq was justified by the coalition Bush put together. O’Donnell noted that the so-called “coalition of the willing” didn’t exactly represent the full support of the international community, but in the fog of the interview’s back and forth, Rice just started adding countries that weren’t even part of the coalition:

RICE: So the Georgians who went there and the Japanese who went there and others –

O’DONNELL: Actually had soldiers firing weapons on the ground?

RICE: This was not part of the coalition. The people who — the British and the Australians and the Poles and all of those who — the Canadians, all of those who were ultimately in Iraq, these were not part of the coalition?

Canada, eh? Just one little problem with that:

After months of hesitation, Canada said Tuesday that it has no intention of contributing to a U.S.-led attack on Iraq that has not been endorsed by the U.N. Security Council.

I guess it's easy to win an argument when you can just make up your own facts. Or maybe the completely false claim that Canada was a member of the Coalition of the Willing just wasn't intended to be a factual statement.

I am sick and tired of interviewers that try to sway instead of interview. You gotta give her credit, she turned it all around. Somehow I just think that was smart.

CinnamonGirl wrote: I am sick and tired of interviewers that try to sway instead of interview. You gotta give her credit, she turned it all around. Somehow I just think that was smart.

It might be "smart" in a sense, but the net result was that almost nothing was conveyed except that the two of them indulged in a slugfest. Seems to me the opposite of the goal of effective communication. So in my opinion, the real losers were the viewers. That's become so common that it's one of the reasons I avoid watching TV news. It would be really refreshing for once to see an interviewer and interviewee who both came into it with the idea of turning up some fresh insights instead of "winning" at pushing forward their own agendas. That's not to say I don't still think that interviewers not only have a right, but a duty, to ask questions that maybe the interviewer may not want to answer.

But what I don't get is how you are condoning what he did in this process.

Do you not think that an interviewer has a duty to try to cut through the canned remarks and poke holes in the storyline of an interviewee?

He swayed the whole thing to make her look stupid. That is my complaint. If that is they way you think they should do it then that is the real issue here. I just wonder what you would have thought had it been someone like O'reilly doing it to Obama. Which he did.

What did you think of that interview are you fine with what Bill did? Obama handled him very well. BTW, Check out the Bin Laden/pakistan remarks around 5:40.

[youtube:2jtkihqb][/youtube:2jtkihqb]

CinnamonGirl wrote: What did you think of that interview are you fine with what Bill did?

Watched it, and yep, I'm fine with it. Both journalists were doing their jobs. Their job isn't to make the interviewee look good, it's too press hard on controversial issues.

Well, I think it is a wimpy thing to do. And I think Condy did fine.