Calling All Wingnuts

Last Sunday (Jan. 29, ‘06), Tim Russert interviewed Bill Frist on MTP. The interview was surprisingly decent. However… Russert never asked Frist if he stood by Ann Coulter’s recent comment with regards to putting rat poison in Justice Stevens’ food… He had no problem asking Barak Obama about Harry Belafonte’s comments about Bush the terrorist, so I was expecting something similar for white boy Frist…
Anyway…

More seriously, Frist was quizzed about the SEC investigation surrounding his sale of HCA stock. He had been holding it for well over 10 years, when he suddenly decided to sell. Several issues were raised. First, Frist, as Majority leader, was instrumental in passing all sorts of health care legislation. Holding onto stocks that will be directly impacted by the laws you pass… well, some owuld say that there might be some ethical problems there… But not Frist… No, the Senator from Tennessee said his stocks were in a blind trust. He said he had no idea what was in that trust. That mighta made a difference…

if it was true.

As we learned later, Frist got frequent reports of what his holdings were. Not only that, but he could direct the investment decisions made concerning the stocks in his “blind trust” because he did exactly that with his HCA stock. He ordered it sold, just days before it’s value dropped on bad news.

Some might say that there’s nothing untoward going on here – after all, the bad news didn’t come out of the government….

If you though as much, Mr. Russert did nothing on his show to dissuade you of that notion. You see, Mr. Russert never mentioned that Mr. Frists’ father and brother run the corporation.

I thought that might be one of those salient details viewers might be interested to know since Russert was talking about an insider trading case.

So anyway… Tony Snow was discussing the interview and suggesting that Russert was asking mean, partisan questions of poor ol’ Bill Frist. I was compelled to call…

While on hold, however, several callers wanted to discuss Iraq. I’m game, I love Iraq discussions. I folded it into the context of the Russert discussion.

Something I cannot stand is that every pundit asks the same old, tired questions of the same guests and… wait for it… surprise!!! We get the same friggin answers.

Here are two questions I want asked and answered.

1) Everyone agrees war should be the last resort. Since we had air superiority over 2/3 of Iraq (really, we had air superiority over the entire country – Saddam’s Air Force never showed up during the war), why didn’t we construct our own inspection teams. Use helicopters, paratroopers and whatever support necessary to conduct surprise inspections of any location we wished. If Saddam refused cooperation in any way at all, we bomb the site silly. That strategy would have taken care of any “imminent threat” without us having to occupy a country, spend billions and kill tens of thousands.

2) If WMD was such a concern, why didn’t we secure Tuwaitha, Iraq’s largest and best-known nuclear research facility. Instead, we left it to be looted. How many dirty bombs can be made from the material that was carted off? where did it go to?

Further, why did we protect Iraq’s oil ministry with 52 tanks and snipers on every floor? If we were after evidence of WMD, wouldn’t have made sense to secure the Ministry of Defense? Instead, we chose one building in all of Baghdad to protect – the Oil Ministry. Meanwhile, Iraqi’s watched as the rest of the city was looted. what kind of message was that meant to send?

Tuwaitha left unguarded
Washington Post story

Oil Ministry well guarded
Oh, the irony…