When she wasn't alluding to silver bullets, swatted flies or boiling blood, Rice talked about shaking a tree. "I just don't buy the argument that we weren't shaking the trees enough" in the hope that terrorists or clues about terrorist activity would fall out, Rice told commission member Fred Fielding. She didn't get to say much during Fielding's allocated 10-minute segment, however, because Fielding's questions, which were more like statements, went on and on.
It was largely the same when Jamie Gorelick's turn came around. She rambled until she finally got to the end of a question, then interrupted Rice's attempt to answer. Former Illinois governor James R. Thompson, the last member of the commission to speak, chose a venerable metaphor but dressed it up a little when he said, "I don't believe in beating dead horses, but there's a lot of lame ones running around here today. Let's see if we can't push them out the door."
National security adviser Condoleezza Rice stayed calm despite some hostile questions from the 9/11 commission.
(Bill O'leary -- The Washington Post)
|
|
Most of the time Rice kept her guard up and answered the questions formally and impersonally. But at one point, noting that democracy is a goal not easily achieved, she said, "When our founding fathers said, 'We the people,' they didn't mean me," a reference to her African American heritage.
All the networks cluttered the screen with news tickers and captions during the coverage. CNN had the bad taste to keep its ticker going even when it turned to "news" about health, so viewers saw Rice talking about 9/11 and the horrors of terrorism while below her there were items about the efficacy of Viagra and how "iron therapy" can relieve the "restless leg syndrome." Even less forgivably, CNN used the space above the ticker to promote one CNN show after another, some of them two and three times.
Fox's news ticker kept moving along, too. At first, Fox didn't supply the party affiliations of the commission members. But, perhaps because Fox executives saw that CNN was doing it, it started putting a (D) or an (R) after a commissioner's name in the captions.
Fox pulled a shocker after the testimony by including a genuinely (or at least seemingly) bipartisan analyst among its contributors, veteran foreign affairs expert Richard Holbrooke, who had previously testified before the committee in closed session.
Earlier, commentator Brit Hume offered analysis that sounded more like typical Fox fare. But Hume did say that while he found the commission's session "highly partisan," he didn't think it was "outside of bounds." When he concluded his remarks, Hume was thanked gushingly by wacky anchor David Asman. "What a pleasure to have you, Brit!" Asman exclaimed, as if Hume were a visiting dignitary from a foreign country.
As always, there was plenty of blarney bandied about on all the networks, and undoubtedly there was a good deal of it in what Rice said, too. But on television, it's not what you say but the way that you say it -- for the most part. By that standard, this was not live coverage of a news event but the Condoleezza Rice Show, and it looked like a hit.
