What I Learned on the T.V.

Sorry if I got egg nog on you, but I was watching a "Meet the Press" rerun Sunday night. It was a special edition, Tim Russert talking with Tom Brokaw and Ted Koppel. It's a real pleasure to hear anchors who are no longer anchoring, because they can speak more freely.

They shed light on a lot of subjects. Then there was this exchange, talking about the lead up to the Iraq war:

MR. BROKAW: There was not--you know, the French intelligence were sharing the same conclusions with the administration. I thought--I agree with you that I don't think that we pushed hard enough for vigorous debate. I think that on Capitol Hill that the debate was anemic, at best. You had--Ted Kennedy and Senator Byrd, really, were the only ones speaking out with any kind of passion in the Senate, the people who...
MR. RUSSERT: And they were not questioning whether Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
MR. BROKAW: No. No. No.
MR. RUSSERT: That seemed to be a uniformly held belief.
MR. BROKAW: Right. Yeah.
MR. KOPPEL: Nor did the Clinton administration beforehand.
MR. BROKAW: No.
MR. KOPPEL: I mean, the only difference between the Clinton administration and the Bush administration was 9/11.
MR. BROKAW: Right.
MR. KOPPEL: If 9/11 had happened on Bill Clinton's watch, he would have gone into Iraq.
MR. BROKAW: Yeah. Yeah.
MR. RUSSERT: Let me continue on Iraq and show you pictures from December 15. These are 11 million Iraqis voting, proudly holding up their fingers, having dipped it in ink as evidence that they had cast their vote; even on their hospital beds, making their vote and their views known.

I just spit up more egg nog writing it down. I'm not sure which is more disorienting-- that Koppel, an enormously gifted journalist, would blurt that out, or that nobody reacted, or at least said, "Gee Ted, are ya sure about that?"

Read the whole transcript of the 12/25 edition of "Meet the Press."