Hewitt Blog

Details here.

The newsweekly's Baghdad burea chief joined me for a long conversation about the war in Iraq and journalism's role --including his-- in it.

It will play in the second hour today, and replay in the first hour on Thursday.

Radioblogger.com will have a transcript up later.

Parts of this interview trouble me a great deal. Ware is quite obviously a courageous, battle-hardened and determined reporter, but his answers to a variety of questions leave me concerned that the pressure of his circumstances will impact his reporting, and may have already impacted the candor of his assessment of the jihadists and the "insurgents." His refusal to answer other questions of historical judgment and relevance --were the Soviets better off under Stalin or Khrushchev, for example-- tell me he is aware of the deep problems with his analysis of Iraq under Saddam and post-Saddam, and that he refuses to engage in any conversation that will inevitably expose that analysis as indefensible.

But the major problem comes from the threat of distortion born of fear, the same problem that we learned plagued CNN under Saddam, but learned only after Saddam was toppled.

The public can judge for itself whether Ware's defense of his choices is persuasive. But those choices have few if any parallels in American journalism's history of wartime reporting.

Jonah has angered the Helenbots. When Helen appeared on my show only to hang up on me, I got the same appreciative mail. Best line from JG:

That anyone could hate-Bush (or what I had to say in his defense) so much as to lionize Helen Thomas is a sign of bone-deep intellectual bankruptcy or just plain ignorance.

The McCain-Kennedy immigration bill is to the Arizona senator a
Harriet Miers nomination and a ports deal rolled into one and cubed. That it follows McCain-Feingold and the Gang of 14 only nails down the undeniable truth of the proposition that John McCain will never submit his political self-interest to the collective interest of the GOP. As with the Gang of 14, Senator McCain has dragged Ohio's DeWine and South Carolina's Graham with him, leaving me very discouraged about the ability to rally people to DeWine's cause in the fall.

As I discuss at length in the new book, GOP voters value party loyalty and always have. Forcing a jam down through Judiciary with the help of his smitten colleagues and Democratic votes deals the party an enormous blow, and threatens not only DeWine but all the other shakey Senate seats as well as the potential pick-ups in New Jersey, Maryland, West Virginia, Minnesota, Michigan, Nebraska
and Washington.

That's not party loyalty. That's party self-loathing.

The GOP has to run in November on its strongest card which is the reliability of the president and the party he leads in the GWOT. The ports deal dented that earned reputation, but not badly, and not for long.

Blowing off border security --a real fence, not a "virtual" one, serious ID reform and various other steps-- in order to court national approval from the center-left does more than endanger McCain's presidential ambitions though.

It endangers future SCOTUS nominees and even the war.

Senator McCain likes to remind audiences that he's 100% behind the president on the war.

But that's not possible when ambition overwhelms the party's best political interests. Lose the Senate and you almost certainly will end up losing the war. Lose the House and the Senate and that loss is certain.

It's March. It's an election year. That means that Hugh Hewitt must have a book coming out ...

Ed's correct of course, and just in time given the mess the immigration debate has become and the House's lassitude on lobbhying reform. It also means a Radioblogger contest.

Which is very, very amusing...and only just begun.

My favorite part about launching a book are the enraged reviews by lefties at Amazon.com. Each new one is the equiavlkent of "He winds. He shoots. He scores!" Example:

3 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

So you can screw things up even more?, March 27, 2006
Reviewer: S. Davis - See all my reviews

Geeze, you guys control everything and the country is a mess. Heck, you guys aren't happy wrecking America....you want to wreck the whole planet. One party rule is disastrous. Hail King Bush and the enabling R congress. The current "conservative" party is toxic. Stop while your ahead.

Send your favorite lefty a copy. And send your GOP Congressman or Senator a couple.

Los Angeles Times columnist Joel Stein:

But I kind of like the Mexicans. I find it hard to hate people who clean my house and serve delicious, cheap food. If the Germans could learn to dust and make a decent taco, I think we would have stopped making Holocaust movies a while ago.

LAObserved's Kevin Roderick on Stein's column: "I don't think he did anything to disabuse those who think he's a lightweight."

Stein is the Times, and he represents the paper extremely well.

Charles Krauthammer's "Fukuyama's Fantasy" is going to leave a mark.

A brand, actually.

It is unwise --and credibility destroying-- to invent occasions from which to build cases. Which is exactly what Krauthammer demonstrates Fukuyama has done.

John McCain, on the immigration bill he is co-sponsoring with Ted Kennedy, which rejects the House bill's emphasis on border security, including fencing of the sort that worked in San Diego:

"We are eager, once the Senate passes this bill, to sit down and talk with them, but there are certain fundamental principles which we simply cannot compromise on," said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who cosponsored the bill that passed the Judiciary Committee largely intact last night. "It has to be a comprehensive approach. As we all know, just building walls and hiring more border patrols are not the answers to our immigration problem."

The House bill reflected the number one priority of the party and the nation, which is security. The continuing refusal of many to acknowledge that the borders present a national security threat of the first order is why the immigration issue generally remains such a political nightmare for both parties.

In 2002 the Democrats obstructed the bill establishing the Homeland Security Department over demands from government unions on how the department would be organized.

Voters saw that as a dangerous inversion of priorities and punished the Dems at the polls.

Now some Senate Republicans have joined with Senate Dems to invert priorities again. The only sensible approach is to put the priority on the security issue and demand all other related issues take a back seat.

If the Senate passes an immigration bill that does not include fencing, the message will go out that the GOP is not serious about security. The voters already know this to be true about the Democrats, but McCain's rhetoric threatens to strip the Republicans of their earned reputation for taking the threats to the nation seriously.

WaPo lefty Eugene Robinson understands what Senator McCain is up to, as the columnist turns from slamming the president's proposal to an endorsement of the McCain-Kennedy bill:

Much better is the proposal by Sens. John McCain and Edward Kennedy that would declare what amounts to an amnesty for undocumented immigrants.

John McCain is, once again, seeking the approval of the Beltway elite at the expense of his party's interests.

Tony Blair defends the war on a visit to Australia.

You need to read his speech on the future of newspapers. Jeff Jarvis explains why.