Webloggin » Man v. Boy: Rove v. David “Howdy Doody” Gregory

While watching yesterday’s “Meet the Press” telecast, I almost felt sorry for Howdy Doody lookalike, NBC’s David Gregory, who was filling in for the regular host, former Mario Cuomo errand boy Tim Russert.

He was interviewing Karl Rove, and my bottom line review is “Hey David, pick up your jock!” Here’s how it went. Gregory recites a threadbare, lefty cliché, no doubt culled by one of his producers from the Daily Kos or the Huffington Post, and smugly waits for a response. Karl Rove clearly and articulately responds with the surefire antidote, the crucifix to the MSM vampire, facts, facts and more facts. Consider the following exchange, which occurred after Gregory robotically recited the litany of hackneyed hooey about the liberation of Iraq (say it along with me: no WMD, the cost of the war was ‘misestimated,’ the level of sectarian violence was wrong, Iraqi war revenues would be used to pay for the war).

MR. GREGORY: But, Karl, I’m asking you a specific question about whether misjudgments were made and whether you acknowledge those.

MR. ROVE: I understand. I understand, but I want to deal with each one of these because I want to acknowledge, I want to acknowledge the reality behind each one of them. You say, for example, you make the assertion that oil revenues are not being used to pay for reconstruction. You’re absolutely wrong.

MR. GREGORY: The predication was they would pay for the war.

MR. ROVE: The Iraqi—let me finish—the Iraqi government has a capacity $41 billion budget, $10 billion, most of which comes from oil revenues, $10 billion of which goes to reconstruction. And so are they using their own resources to reconstruct the country? You bet. But, look, it’s one thing to rattle off all of these, and it’s a nice tactic. I appreciate—I applaud you for doing so. But if you take a moment and look at each one of these you’ll find that in each one of these there is a reasonable—you know, look, was everything done perfectly? No. But it—was this the right thing to do? You bet. And has the policy worked out exactly as people planned? Look, Napoleon said that your battle plan doesn’t survive the first contact with the enemy, but you still have to have a plan. And did everything work out like people expected and hoped? No. But is it the right thing to do and is it vital for the security interests of the United States? If we were to leave Iraq with the job undone, we would be running the risk of seeing the entire region plunge into violence. We would see Iran emboldened. We would see Hezbollah, Hamas and the al-Qaeda emboldened. We could see a terrorist state emerge in the heart of the Middle East. Not in Afghanistan with no natural resources, but in the very heart of the Middle East with the third largest oil reserves in the world. And we could see an increasing danger for our friends and allies in the region from Turkey to Lebanon to Jordan to Israel to Egypt to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states.”

David, did you get the license number? Was Howdy Doody’s smirk an attempt to conceal his realization that he had just had his head handed to him, or am I giving him too much credit? (I can go either way on that one. Based on watching DG over the years, I lean toward the latter.)

The only discouraging thing about watching Karl Rove slice and dice this blowdried bonehead is the realization that most of the time, our candidates don’t make similar confident, forceful response to the endless stream of liberal blather on these talking head shows. I am demanding that every Republican candidate watch this Rove appearance and every speech Newt Gingrich has made over the last 15 years until they understand how easy it is to demolish liberal lies.

Gregory also took the opportunity to repeat what is obviously the latest subject of a fax from democrat HQ to all their media friends, the apparently heart-stopping revelation (no pun intended) that on April 15, 1994, Dick Cheney said it would have been a mistake to remove Saddam Hussein. What are the libs going to discover next? The hot new band Nirvana?

What Keith Olbermann, Jon Stewart and the afore-mentioned Gregory don’t get is that, as they bleat on and on and continue replaying a tape from 1994, they simply reinforce what intelligent observers already know: they are completely clueless about history, and are blissfully unaware that the world changed on 9/11, which is why they can’t be trusted with national security. Of course, Karl Rove knocked the big juicy one over the plate out of the park.

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