Then why haven’t they said as much? It’s not like these two guys are shy about speaking their minds.
Axxording to this Washingont Post story:
Hamilton’s prior commitment was to introduce the Canadian Prime Minister *at a luncheon. *
Kerrey’s prior commitment with Senator Domenici regarded fundraising for Kerrey’s current employer, New School University.
Triple double fuck you both.
And they didn’t think about the possible PR ramifications of up and leaving?
I call bullshit.
Sure, that’s why they made up lame excuses rather than openly declaring their contempt for the wanker in chief. They’ve sent the message, but left the dimwits wondering.
To spare the feelings of the Canucks in the SDMB, can we please pretend that meeting the Canadian PM isn’t some mickeymouse trivial thing that can be blown off at a moment’s notice? I can feel my inferiority complex starting to act up.
I’m frankly amazed that this thread has gone so far and only two posters have recognized that both Kerrey and Hamilton aren’t exactly unskilled or unpracticed political animals. I have to wonder at those of you castigating these two for cluelessness and/or dereliction.
Here’s the fact: The vicechairman and the most prominent opposition party commissioner of arguably the most important investigative committee post-9/11 walk out early from that commission’s one and only scheduled meeting with the President and Vice President… Gee, you’d almost think they were signalling the country that this was not exactly the most informationally significant session… as if it were an off-the-record, unofficial, nonbinding and deniable exercise in political playacting or something.
Gosh, I wonder if they knew how it would look.
Here’s some more cluelessness:
He’s so sanguine and careless, that Kerrey. Y’know?
Sorry Manduck, rhetoric about the importance of the commission’s meet with the leaders of the free world has gotten very hyperbolic. That necessarily distorts the value of Hamilton’s other engagements. -no insult intended.
[QUOTE=Mr. Moto]
tdn, you do realize that Kerrey used to be a Democratic senator, and that Domenici is a current Democratic senator? They’re colleagues, part of the boy’s club. Rescheduling that appointment could have been accomplished easily.QUOTE]
FYI, Pete Domenici is a Republican Senator from New Mexico. FWIW.
Of course they would have. That would be their primary reason for doing it, and their primary reason for coming up with cover stories. What is this “bullshit” you speak of?
bnorton, you got an answer from xenophon41. The final report will have the most credibility if there is no credible way to denounce it as partisan. The cover stories that the former Dem Senator and the former GOP Congressman told help preserve that.
[QUOTE=Frostillicus]
Oops.
I did know that. I just momentarily got my senators confused.
No one is saying meeting with the Canadian PM is a trivial thing.
But I would submit that meeting with your own governmental leader trumps meeting a foreign leader. I would expect Canadian parliamentarians to keep Bush waiting if they were meeting with their PM.
I suspect this was a miscalculation on the part of the two in question. I think they intended this to be a snub at the president, a kind of a, “This type of questioning is useless” statement. But it blew up in their faces. Even people who support the commission and don’t like Bush went, “WTF are you thinking?” So now they are backpedaling and going on about how great the meeting was, and how candid Bush was, and how much they learned, and yada yada yada.
Only fools would fail to anticipate a certain amount of backlash from walking out on a meeting with the president. Kerry and Domenici are not fools. They made their point. They rained on Bush’s little parade. The rest is as important as the buzzing of flies around the back end of a cow.
:dubious: Can you imagine the fallout if someone dissed Tony Blair in this manner?
I think the whole point is Blair should understand.
Blair has been our most loyal ally in this war. I am sure he would understand if some senator was a little delayed meeting with him because he was listening to Bush and Cheney talk about 9/11.
But introducing the Canadian PM (or to be fair any other PM including Tony Blair) at a reception luncheon IS a trivial thing compared to the 9/11 investigation. I agree these two are sharp enough to understand that this would be perceived as a deliberate snub. In fact, I HOPE it was a deliberate snub, because the alternative (that they didn’t understand either the importance of the meeting or the signals that would be sent by ducking out) is even more depressing to contemplate.
So I accept that they are playing pissant little partisan insider games. And I curse them yet again. Not even war and deaths by the thousands can convince either side to put away the toys and work together like grownups. If they seriously thought that Bush and Cheney were wasting the time of all involved with vague, canned answers, then they should have spent some time trying to rip open some new assholes. Maybe some more info would have got out that way.
And it’s Business As Usual inside the beltline. And that is an appalling disservice to the ten of thousands, maybe well into the hundreds of thousands, of people who have died on or since 9/11 as a direct result of that event.
It would be very poor diplomacy if nothing else. Anyway, while we’re being fair here, remember that Kerrey and Domenici were in that hearing and we were not, so presumably they are in a better position to judge the importance of whatever was going on in there.
My take on it, when I heard that two prominent Democrats had left early, was that (a) the session was a pointless exercise* and (b) they were making a deliberate statement along the lines of “as it turns out, given the informational content, this meeting with the President and Vice-President is in fact less important than my other scheduled commitment.”
I was not offended by this.
Then again, I’m a lifelong Democrat and liberal, and I thought that Bush & Cheney’s meeting with the 9/11 Commission was useless, since they refused to testify publicly, under oath and separately.
I do see your point, though. The office of the President deserves the respect, even if the officeholder doesn’t. If I didn’t loathe Bush and his cronies, I might even muster up some outrage over it.
*unless, of course, you want to see how good Dick Cheney’s ventrilquism skills are.