Tuesday, March 14th

I'm going to upset the chronology today to take a look back at an earlier episode of the Grapevine that was broadcast on Tuesday, March 14th. I had read this segment, but not having seen the Bill Mahr interview in question, couldn't really comment on Hume's take. Well, now Crooks and Liars has posted the video clip of the interview on their excellent website (it's my favorite blog, by far) and so I can comment. Here was Hume's take:

New York Times Baghdad bureau chief John Burns has long been highly pessimistic about the war in Iraq from the start. In an interview with TV host Bill Maher Friday night, Burns remained pessimistic, but he also said that now "U.S. military and political diplomatic leadership in Iraq ... is about as good as you could possibly get." And he said the U.S. team there has "got the formula more or less right."

But by the time the trade publication Editor and Publisher had edited and published the Burns interview you wouldn't have known any of that. The magazine ignored it all instead claiming that Burns for the first time was predicting failure.

Ok, now that you've read Hume's comments, why not hop on over to crooks and liars and watch the video, and decide for yourself whether Editor and Publisher painted a distorted picture of the substance of the interview. I think this citation pretty much sums up the segment, and shows how disingenuous Hume's criticisms really are:

Burns: ...there were many mistakes made, but my feeling is that if this fails -- as I have to say, on balance of the odds, it seems now likely to do-- it's probably not going to be because of American mistakes, but because the mission was impossible in the first place... and something else I'd like to say, which is that there were mistakes... of course there were serious mistakes, probably the most serious of them was what was allowed to happen at Abu Ghraib... but the American Military and the political and diplomatic leadership in Iraq now, it seems to me, is about as good as you could possibly get... if the American enterprise in Iraq can be brought to some kind of satisfactory conclusion, improbable as that seems to be, it will be in some measure because they do now have a team in Iraq, Ambassador Herozad, General Casey, General Abizaid, as the Middle East commander, and I think they've got the formula more or less right, but whether it can prevail, that's very uncertain...

It's really hard to imagine that Editor and Publisher could possibly have distorted the piece to draw a bleaker picture than that. But, you know... if you're Brit Hume, then grasping at straws is what you do for a living.