The topic was Rove's appearance yesterday at the winter meeting of the Republican National Committee, at which he laid out a battle plan for the 2006 mid-term elections. Rove was shown saying "honorable people can have honest political differences, and we should strive for civility and intellectual integrity in our debates and arguments."
That seemed to surprise Kiran: "Rove, known for being the one who is the attack dog at the White House, was actually calling for civility."
No word from Kiran on those civilized gentlemen of the Democratic party. You know, the ones who portrayed the palpably decent Samuel Alito as a lying, unethical, racist misogynist.
An aside: Kiran's co-host Julian Phillips, while praising Rove's effectiveness, expressed surprise at his appearance at the RNC meeting since "a lot of people thought he might be disappearing with the indictment of Scooter Libby."
Later, liberal Ellen Ratner was off her game in debating conservative columnist Jim Pinkerton in "The Long & the Short of It" segment.
Ratner set a trap for herself and promptly fell into it. She began by laying out Rove's key argument: that Democrats live in a pre-9/11 world while Republicans live in a post-9/11 world. But while claiming that Democrats are "just as terrified" at what happened, she claimed:
"We just have a very different strategy, those of us who disagree with the war, as to how to protect America."
Kiran sweetly sprung the trap, asking the obvious question: "what is the strategy?"
The sum total of Ratner's recommendations for fighting the war on terror? A totally defensive one: inspect more ship containers coming into the US, and "better borders." She seemed to hesitate slightly in making her latter suggestion, no doubt aware that Democrats are hardly known as the party of hardened borders and tough immigration policies. Ay carumba!
Later, when it came to domestic surveillance, Ratner got her search engines confused. She spoke of the controversy surrounding the government's demand for information collected by "Yahoo" on its users' searches. It was Google, Ellen.
She compounded her stumble, saying "we don't want people in our homes." Sounds downright inhospitable, Ellen. She later amended "we don't want the government in our homes." And here I thought Dems believe 'it takes a village'!
Ratner then managed a straight face in seconding Hillary Clinton's criticism of President Bush for 'outsourcing' our foreign policy on Iran to the Europeans. Ratner criticized the "ceding of power" to other countries and "giving up the Iran negotiations to the European Union."
This from a spokesman for the Democrats, the party that worships mulilateralism, whose John Kerry wanted to give the UN a veto on our actions, that loves to accuse W of being a go-it-alone cowboy. Please.
One last Ratner gaffe: she denied that Democrats live in a "pre-11 world." Does that make Ratner a perfect 12?
Ellen, please, before your next appearance, get a good night's sleep and brew yourself a nice strong pot of Contra Coffee. Remember, we're living in a post-11 world here!
