"Tough" Tim Russert Refuses To Challenge Rudy's Dissembling
November 18, 2007 -- 12:40 PM EST // //
We keep hearing that Tim Russert is very, very "tough." We keep hearing that he doesn't let any craven or dissembling politician slip any malarky past him, dammit.
Except, of course, that he does -- when it's Rudy.
Take a look at this snippet from Meet the Press today, in which Russert and a panel of pundits discussed whether Bernie Kerik's legal travails will hurt Rudy:
Russert flashed the following quote from Rudy on the screen justifying his relationship with Kerik:
"There were mistakes made with Bernie Kerik. But what's the ultimate result for the people of New York City? The ultimate result ... was a 74 percent reduction in shootings, [and] a 60 percent reduction in crime..Neither Russert nor his guests spent a second asking whether Rudy's claims were true. Russert selected this quote beforehand, so he had plenty of time to entertain this question. But he didn't -- and neither did his guests. Instead, they only discussed whether it will work politically."Sure, there were issues, but if I have the same degree of success and failure as president of the United States, this country will be in great shape."
And yet, as has already been thoroughly documented, Rudy's claims amount to dissembling of the wildest sort. Interpreting what Rudy said literally here, his meaning was that these stats described the success of Kerik's top-cop tenure, which lasted a mere year and a half. This is an enormous falsehood.
The most charitable interpretation of Rudy's use of stats here is that he was referring to numbers documenting the crime drop during his entire tenure. But this, too, is wildly dishonest in spirit. Meant this way, the claim is designed to blunt the damage of the Kerik stories by vaguely suggesting that Rudy's choice of Kerik, however flawed he was, played a major role in New York's crime-fighting successes -- a claim that dishonestly obscures the truth, which is that Kerik's year and a half of service had very little to do with that long-range drop.
The point is, no matter how you interpret it, Rudy's push-back demands aggressive factual scrutiny. Yet here you have a group at the top of the punditry game -- Russert, Chuck Todd, Ronald Brownstein, Gwenn Ifil, etc. -- and none of them even took a tentative step down that path. These folks are so preoccupied with whether Rudy's pushback will work that there's no mental space left to question whether it's true. The irony, of course, is that this wrongheaded focus makes it more likely that Rudy's pushback will work.
This point was driven home when, in the final downer, one of the assembled pundits says: "If he is the nominee, time will begin again, the morning after. We will begin to explore the New York record, and debate it and discuss it in a way that we haven't so far."
That's nice. "We" are going to wait until he's the nominee before exploring and debating his record aggressively? Maybe that's why no one here bothered to challenge his Kerik statement today. "We" have decided that "we" are going to wait until he's the nominee before doing this.
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