This Week's Meet The Press Panel Autopsy

Amazingly, I was able to watch this week’s Meet the Press panel featuring Rudy Giuliani and Thomas Friedman without enduring a cerebral meltdown. Tom Brokaw and former Tennessee congressman Harold Ford were also on the panel.

Here are some highlights (lowlights, really):

At one point, Giuliani was bitching about Medicare and the prospect of a public option possibly leading to a government monopoly on health care. Why? Because the government would be able to undersell private insurers and price them out of the market.

Does everybody get that? Giuliani is wary of government health insurance because it doesn’t have to make a profit, and so would be able to provide affordable coverage for Americans at the expense of bloodsucking, premium-jacking private HMOs. Giuliani is not alone in ruing this scenario where health insurance is provided as an end in itself instead of as a means to a profit. Conservatives like to ask, What’s wrong with making a profit? Fundamentally, nothing. But when the health care of hundreds of millions of people is tightly intertwined with the need to satisfy the financial interests of shareholders and executive boards, you’re asking for trouble.

Giuliani also asked an important question, but coming from him it was more partisan than sincere. He wondered how we’re going to pay for a public option—a legitimate concern, but Harold Ford was there to say something I’ve been waiting for a pro-health care reformer to say, and basically that is: Why didn’t you ask how the country was going to pay for the Bush tax cuts, or the Iraq war? Ford then noted that outrageous rate at which premiums are climbing annually, which Giuliani apparently tried to deny. Go get ‘em Harry.

Moderator David Gregory actually said this about his panel: “If I were preparing a Sunday brunch, it doesn’t get any better than this.”

Really, Dave? Rudy Giuliani? Tom Friedman? While these guys are fascinating for many unflattering reasons, let’s not get carried away. I admit that Sunday brunch would be interesting with these guys, but I’d abstain from the actual brunch part, lest one of these guys makes me lose my omelet.

Besides, who needs Giuliani, Friedman, or even Harold Ford, when you could just have a roving gang of Tom Brokaws on your panel?

Friedman, commenting on the conservative backlash against Barack Obama’s scheduled speech to schoolchildren, called it “flat-out stupid” three times in seven seconds. No joke.

The panel then switched gears to Afghanistan, and I have to say, I was extremely disappointed that Friedman didn’t incorporate the staple of his Iraq war analyses: the Friedman Unit (FU) in his assessment of Afghanistan. I guess saying, “In the next six months…” on over a dozen separate occasions is only appropriate when dealing with Iraq. Anyway, Gregory quotes his column from today’s New York Times, titled “From Baby-Sitting to Adoption” about the seemingly changing U.S. mission in Afghanistan. The column is keeping with Friedman’s tradition of employing metaphor and mismatched imagery to obfuscate the simplicity of his ideas. In fact, the structure of a typical Friedman column can be expressed mathematically,

m + a (n ≥ 2) + s = typical Friedman column

Where (m) is metaphor, (a) is an anecdote only loosely (if at all) functionally related to (m), and (s) is a hopelessly simplistic conclusion drawn from the specious summing of (m) and at least two (a). Combined in this way, they equal a Friedman column.

Gregory asked the panel, “Is this war winnable?” to which Ford replied precisely what I was thinking—that we need to define what’s meant by “winning” before even attempting to answer the question. By then, however, time was almost up, so the panel barely scratched the surface. Perhaps it was for the better, because this Meet the Press was a real yawner.

- Max