January 31, 2001

Today is the last day in January, and not a bad day to get this blog re-started. Brit Hume is in fine form, on the "Grapevine" today writing:

The star player at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland this weekend was not Bill Gates, Brad Pitt or John Kerry. It was Bill Clinton, who arrived in a 10-car motorcade, and delivered his remarks to a packed house. The former president addressed what he called the three greatest challenges facing the world today, but terrorism didn't make the list. Instead, Clinton called climate change the world's biggest threat, followed by "global inequality."

Clinton mentioned terrorism only as a manifestation of his third biggest challenge: the world's "apparently irreconcilable cultural and religious" divides.

Here's what Clinton actually said, according to Newsday.com:

Clinton called on current world leaders to seek ways of easing the "apparently irreconcilable religious and cultural differences in the world, that are manifest most stunningly in headlines about terrorist actions but really go far beyond that."

Cleary, Brit Hume's characterization of terrorism as "not making the list" is, at best disingenuous, and at worst dishonest. When a speaker announces that one of the greatest challenges facing mankind is the tackling of the root causes of terrorism, only a biased shill would summarize the speech by proclaiming that terrorism did not "make the list" of that speaker's top concerns. But, hey... that description pretty much sums up Brit Hume doesn't it?

Hume rounds out today's "Grapevie" with an attack on Hillary Clinton, and most hypocritically, by taking a dig at Dan Rather. Pretty rich, isn't it? The host of the most biased two minutes in Television attacking a competing journalist for his supposed bias.