Senator Joseph Lieberman and White House Communications Director Ed Gillespie were guests yesterday.
Lieberman has an op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal, "Democrats and Our Enemies," which begins:
How did the Democratic Party get here? How did the party of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy drift so far from the foreign policy and national security principles and policies that were at the core of its identity and its purpose? The transcript of our conversation is here. One exchange:
HH: Do you expect to address the Republican convention, Senator?
JL: You know, I don’t know. I’ve said that if John McCain asked me to do it, I would do it, because I support his candidacy that strongly, and I think this election year, this presidential election is that important to our future security, obviously to the way our government will run, and the way our economy will be for the next period of our history.
The transcript of the conversation with Gillespie is here. Most of our conversation dealt with NBC';s fraudulent editing of a recent interview the network conducted with the president. At the conclusion of our talk, we discussed MSNBC's descent into madness:
HH: Ed Gillespie, I don’t know who drew the short straw in your shop, and this may very well, I hope, earns us another worst person in the world nominee, but someone’s got to watch Keith Olbermann, and someone has to watch Chris Matthews, because you’re the White House, and you’ve got to know what they’re saying, even if it is a marginal network watched by hard left extremists.
EG: Yeah, it’s somebody below me, Hugh (laughing).
HH: But I mean, hasn’t the impression spread that this is really about ratings? They don’t believe this stuff. They just do what they have to do to get ratings. And if that means going hard left and perverting the news, they’ll pervert the news. And Olbermann’s a sports guy. He doesn’t understand it anyway. What do you guys do about that? I mean, I wouldn’t even bother sending them e-mails. They’re obviously beyond the pale.
EG: Well look, we don’t. I mean, Christopher Matthews and Keith Olbermann, you know, they’re advocates for a worldview that obviously, we don’t agree with here at the White House. And that’s fine. You know, they’re identified as such on MSNBC. What is disconcerting to me, though, is that there are times when they, you know, they pretend to take off their advocate hat, and they become objective newsmen and journalists, and you have Brian Williams and Tim Russert sitting down with them like they’re sitting down with Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews like it’s Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite or something.
HH: Did you ever read Bizarro Superman comic books when you were young, Ed?
EG: I did, yeah.
HH: That’s the Bizarro world of journalism over there.
EG: Right.
HH: And everything’s upside down.
EG: Look, I did raise the question. I said it is, it does concern us here at the White House that, you know, the MSNBC attitude could be seeping into the NBC broadcast network’s coverage.
HH: Clearly, it is. Ed Gillespie from the White House, thank you.
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