{"id":8412,"date":"2006-09-08T14:50:05","date_gmt":"2006-09-08T18:50:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/8412.html"},"modified":"2006-09-08T14:50:05","modified_gmt":"2006-09-08T18:50:05","slug":"gibson-knows-how-to-follow-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/gibson-knows-how-to-follow-up\/","title":{"rendered":"Gibson knows how to follow-up"},"content":{"rendered":"

Since I was fairly critical<\/a> of CBS’s Katie Couric for her softball interview with the president from Wednesday night, I think it’s only fair that I offer ABC’s Charlie Gibson some praise for a much better interview<\/a> yesterday.<\/p>\n

Gibson began by asking Bush how it is we went from a united country after 9\/11 to a divided country now. The president rambled a bit. “[M]y job is to hopefully raise the debate above politics and continue to rally the nation to protect ourselves,” Bush said, “and at the same time to lay the foundation of peace \u2026 but overseas \u2026 sometimes people agree with the decisions I make and sometimes they don’t.” Gibson asked if maybe, just maybe, the war in Iraq divided the nation and the world. Bush responded by talking about 9\/11.<\/p>\n

Gibson: I heard you say just yesterday, “The hardest thing I have to do is to get people to understand how Iraq is a critical part of the war on terror.”<\/p>\n

President Bush: Right.<\/p>\n

Gibson: And that’s the one thing that I question, whether people do have any sense of that. For loathsome as he may have been, Saddam Hussein was not connected to al Qaeda, and he was not behind 9\/11.<\/p>\n

Bush: No, I understand that people ask, “How can this be a connection, between the war on terror and,” you know, “How can Iraq be a connection when Saddam Hussein didn’t order the attacks?” And you know, I understand that concern, because he didn’t order the attacks. The enemy, however, believes that Iraq is a part of the war on terror…. And so the stakes are incredibly high here, Charlie, and yes, this is a part of the war on terror. It is a central part of the war on terror.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So Gibson did what any thinking person would do: he pointed out that Iraq “wasn’t a part of the war on terror until we went in there.”
\n
\nGibson also did a nice job of asking exactly what a “victory” in the war on terror would look like. “Short-term victory will be achieved by defeating people on the battlefield,” Bush said. “Using our intelligence, and to find people before they hurt us. Long-term victories will be achieved, uh, when, the ideology of hate is overcome by the ideology of hope.”<\/p>\n

Silly me, I’ve been afraid of an open-ended war with vague and undetermined goals. All we have to do is watch hope conquer hate and then<\/i> the war can end. What a relief.<\/p>\n

Post Script<\/i>: OK, more tidbit. Gibson brought up reports this week about Pakistan offering Osama bin Laden safe haven. Bush began by saying “the intelligence community came in and gave me a little more, uh, granularity on what he had done.” It led to this exchange:<\/p>\n

Gibson: Does that agreement worry you, though?<\/p>\n

Bush: Well, I don’t know all the details \u2026 (overlap)<\/p>\n

Gibson: Did you call him?<\/p>\n

Bush: Yeah.<\/p>\n

Gibson: Did you call him?<\/p>\n

Bush: Well, I’m going. I’m going to see him pretty soon.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He got “granularity,” but he doesn’t “know the details.” He called Musharaf, but then he sort of didn’t because he’s going to see Musharraf sometime soon anyway.<\/p>\n

It was a bit like a teacher asking a kid of he’d finished his homework — and the kid was struggling to figure out what to say.<\/p>\n

The whole interview was pretty good. There was some fluff in there, but on the whole, Gibson was pretty impressive. Take a look<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Since I was fairly critical of CBS’s Katie Couric for her softball interview with the president from Wednesday night, I think it’s only fair that I offer ABC’s Charlie Gibson some praise for a much better interview yesterday. Gibson began by asking Bush how it is we went from a united country after 9\/11 to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8412","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8412","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8412"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8412\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8412"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8412"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8412"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}