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Columnist David Brooks is a conservative that isn't blindly devoted to former Gov. Sarah Palin. "She's a joke. I can't take her seriously," he told ABC's George Stephanopoulos Sunday. "The idea that this potential talk show host is considered seriously for the republican nomination, believe me, it will never happen. Republican primary voters are not going to elect a talk show host," said Brooks.

But the other conservative on the panel with Brooks wasn't buying into the Palin frenzy either. George Will thinks Republicans can do better. "Some conservatives think they have found in Sarah Palin a Republican William Jennings Bryan. Now, Why would they want someone who lost the presidency three times?" asked Will.

John Amato: David Brooks has never been much of a fan of Palin. This is from a piece in Oct, 2008:

[Sarah Palin] represents a fatal cancer to the Republican party.
--
But there has been a counter, more populist tradition, which is not only to scorn liberal ideas but to scorn ideas entirely. And I'm afraid that Sarah Palin has those prejudices. I think President Bush has those prejudices.

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I'd like to know why the producers of This Week thought it was necessary to bring Laura Ingraham on the show to defend Fox News? She had about as much to add to the conversation as Michelle Malkin did not long ago. The rest of the Villagers did a pretty good job of circling the wagons around Fox whether the likes of Ingraham was there or not. Ingraham's hackery became even too much for the rest of them to take when she started comparing the White House's view of Fox to that of "Islamic Jihadists".

STEPHANOPOULOS: Now the president did cancel the subscription, George, but then he kind of blew it off. Is it time now as President Obama faces down FOX News down for a JFK moment?

WILL: I think so. Look, no president in the history of this republic has less reason to complain about his treatment in the press than President Obama. Liberals have academic, they have a mainstream media, they have Hollywood. They’re all for diversity and everything but thought. And out here is this one channel, FOX, and they’re all up in arms because in the words of Ms. Dunn of the White House, it is opinion journalism masquerading as news, which some of us would say describes the “New York Times” and certainly MSNBC.

PODESTA: Well, we have partners in journalism in America for a couple hundred years. But I think FOX takes it a little bit to a different level. I think Bill Shein, the vice president for news at FOX came out and said, “We are the opposition.” You know, that I think, can you imagine David Westin going out and saying something like that? Anybody, really in the mainstream news organization, they’re organizing. And I think it seems to me they were overcome with that feeling of joy you get from telling the truth once in a while. And probably they may actually even regret going as far as they have.

INGRAHAM: Well as the FOX representative on this show, by the way, you’re all going to be banned from any future White House events from having me at this table.

Bill Shein said that and I know him well. He said that, because he believes that of all the networks, FOX was going to hold the administration the most accountable. Last time I checked, I thought that was the role of the press. I think and again, I might not be invited back George, but when Charlie Gibson didn’t know what the ACORN story was all about, that was a collective gasp you heard across the United States. Charlie Gibson is an esteemed journalist, how do you not know a story about a group where President Obama cut his political teeth that had been exposed to the extent that Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill were ready to pull the rug out from under them in their funding? That’s the kind of the story that the White House doesn’t want to have reported and repeated on other networks. That’s why they don’t like FOX News.

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George Will is either lying, or he doesn't have any idea how to use the Internet. During the panel discussion on This Week, Will says this about the Baucus bill that came out of the Senate Finance Committee.

Stephanopoulos: And if he does is that the last hurdle? Or are we in for more twists here before the end?

Will: I think there could be more twists and there are going to be a lot of amendments put on the floor. And they're going to have to decide whether or not they're going to allow amendments and to what extent they're going to allow extensive debate.

Stephanopoulos: Nancy Pelosi suggested this week that there might not be any amendments on the House floor.

Will: Of course not for the same reason--although they could put this on the internet in 10 minutes, they haven’t put it on the internet, this 1502 pages, because people might discover what’s in there.

As our reader and tipster Stephen noted today, the bill has been on line since Oct. 19th. Anyone can go read all 1504 pages here and here. I guess it's asking too much of George Stephanopoulos to have pointed that out to George Will.

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Well, I guess when Dick Cheney referred to Obama "dithering", he actually meant spending any time thinking about the situation at all, given how little time they spent preparing a report for the incoming administration. CAP's John Podesta points out the problem on This Week:

(Former Bush officials and Republicans) have been citing an Afghanistan strategy report they handed off to the Obama administration that clearly laid out recommendations for moving forward (to criticize Obama's decision process). From Cheney’s recent remarks to the Center for Security Policy:

In the fall of 2008, fully aware of the need to meet new challenges being posed by the Taliban, we dug into every aspect of Afghanistan policy, assembling a team that repeatedly went into the country, reviewing options and recommendations, and briefing President-elect Obama’s team. They asked us not to announce our findings publicly, and we agreed, giving them the benefit of our work and the benefit of the doubt.

Today on ABC’s This Week, Center for American Progress President and CEO John Podesta revealed that the Bush administration spent just one hour on that report:

PODESTA: [T]hey did present him with a report at the very end of the Bush administration, but I have it from reliable sources that the principals in the Bush administration spent one hour on that report before they handed it off to Obama.

Oh...I see...we're operating on the "shoot first, ask questions later" methodology of foreign policy. Yeah, that's worked so well for us so far.

Recently, Sen. Ted Kaufman (D-DE) — a former top aide to Biden and co-chair of the Vice President’s transition team — said that the Bush administration basically just “threw” the report “to the transition team as they were going out the door”:

KAUFMAN: So for him [Cheney] to come in at the end and say, “Well, we did it wrong for eight years. But then, in the end, we gave them a plan which really is what they should have used.” Let me tell you something: This administration came in. Rahm Emanuel was there. I was on the transition team on this. They started from scratch on Afghanistan. They took a blank piece of paper out and said, “What are we going to do to get this thing done?” … It was absolutely the perfect time to take a hard look at what we’re doing.

If nothing else demonstrates why the world community was happy enough with the new direction in foreign policy brought by the Obama administration that they would award him the Nobel Peace Prize, this certainly does. Imagine--taking a measured, educated and thoughtful approach as to how to deal with the mess that is Afghanistan. What a radical notion after the last eight years.

Steve Hynd at Newshoggers has a piece up on Afghanistan that focuses on why the Bush's gut reaction, no brains technique in Afghanistan has made it impossible to ever "win":

Daniel "Pentagon Papers" Ellsberg talks to Real News Network about Afghanistan. He says that he wrote McChrystal's assessment thirty years ago, only with the names changed; that counter-insurgency cannot succeed for a foreign occupier and that there can be no success that will survive after U.S. troops leave Afghanistan.

Ellsberg should be followed by reading Paul McGeogh's blistering critique of McChrystal and Obama's Afghan plan, which I noted yesterday and Andrew Sullivan picked up on today.

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Out numbered as usual like any actual liberal on the Sunday bobble head shows, Katrina Vanden Heuvel makes some great points about why job creation is so important right now for some actual economic recovery to take place, and she's right about the so called health care reform.

VANDEN HEUVEL: You know, John Kenneth Galbraith once said that astrology -- that economic forecasting exists to make astrology look good. In these conditions, Matt, it’s very hard to have predicted what we would see. And don’t forget, the danger of the health care reform is that is it weakened and diluted in the way that the recovery package was so as to address Republicans’ concerns.

That could have been a stronger recovery -- but not strong enough to do what you rightly suggest, which is, parks, bridges, tunnels, an industrial policy, which may make George go berserk because it sounds like socialism, which it isn’t, every advanced industrialized country has an industrial policy which would address the auto industry. Build light rail, buses.

Full transcript below the fold.

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Gee George, it's a good thing no one could have ever said that about our last president, isn't it? I can't imagine those words coming out of Will's mouth if he was referring to George Bush or St. Ronnie.

STEPHANOPOULOS: And George, I guess this is the question. I mean, you saw some overheated criticism, perhaps, there of the president. But a real question, was it the right thing to do to put the prestige of the White House on the line? The White House says, “Hey, you never go wrong fighting for your country.”

WILL: Well, they were fighting for a city, and a city divided about whether or not this will be a good thing to have the Olympics there.

What’s alarming is whether it indicates a belief on the part of the president, which is that there’s no problem that will not melt before the sunshine of his charm. And this is evidence again that it’s not so. The president and first lady went to Copenhagen and gave little speeches about themselves. She, Mrs. Obama, used the first person singular pronoun, in some form or other, “I” or “me,” 16 -- 34 times in 16 paragraphs. He used it 23 times in 13 paragraphs It was all about them.

And the danger is, an adjective sooner or later attaches to presidents. Honest Abe, Tricky Dick Nixon. All kind of adjectives. The danger to the president is that vain is going to attach to him.

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George Will thinks that daring to point out the racism at these tea parties amounts to "liberals' McCarthyism. If anyone's playing the role of Joe McCarthy, it's Glenn Beck, not "liberals" who are pointing out the racist element to these protests, and all the "table pounding" on your part isn't going to change that.

CARTER: An overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man.

BECK: We have a former president who says, if you’re opposed to the president’s health care, you’re a racist.

LIMBAUGH: The left looks at everything through a racial prism. I’m just -- I’m just -- hey, they hit us, we hit back twice as hard.

PELOSI: In the late ‘70s in San Francisco, this kind of -- of rhetoric was very frightening. And it gave -- it created a climate in which we -- violence took place.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

STEPHANOPOULOS: The debate not coming down as President Obama called for. Let me bring the roundtable back in. I’m joined by George Will, Peggy Noonan, Bob Reich, Ed Gillespie, and Donna Brazile.

And, George, as we -- as we get to this, let me show two magazine covers from this week. First, Time magazine, Glenn Beck, mad man, and the angry style of American politics. And then in the New York magazine coming out tomorrow, there’s the tattooed face of Barack Obama , big headline, “Hate.”

We -- we heard President Obama say he thinks that a lot of anti- government feeling, the idea that the government can’t do anything right, is behind all this. What’s your theory?

WILL: The president’s right about that. What we’re hearing is the liberals’ McCarthyism, which is, when in doubt, blame people for racism. Litigators have an old argument: When the law’s on your side, argue the law. When the facts are on your side, argue the facts. When neither’s on your side, pound the table. This amounts to pounding the table.

I have yet to see evidence, is there -- does evidence even intrude in this conversation? Is there any evidence that these people are racists? I think not.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Donna?

BRAZILE: Well, George, there’s some evidence that -- not an overwhelming amount of evidence -- that some of -- a small fringe of this movement, clearly there’s some racism. And you don’t have to know the motives of someone’s heart to understand when you see signs, incendiary signs that basically compares him to a witch doctor, an African heathen. We know racism; we don’t have to be told or taught that. That -- that much we do know.

There’s a culture of extremism that has gained mainstream acceptance. And I think the president is absolutely right. When you see it, you have to call it. You shouldn’t duck it. But, on the other hand, you shouldn’t exaggerate it.

This is why we need responsible leaders to denounce it, but more importantly, we need to find a way to have an honest and good dialogue whenever race is a topic so that the president of the United States, which is very busy, does not have to have beer summits all the time.

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Peggy Noonan with a double dose of her typical snobbery on This Week with George Stephanopoulos. Noonan first calls the President "boorish" for doing his "Full Ginsburg" on the Sunday shows and for all the town hall meetings he's had. Then she goes on to excuse the racism at the tea bag parties and town hall protests.

Stephanopoulos: Peggy one of the arguments the White House makes is they're dealing with a very different media environment than any other President in the past has ever had to deal with. There's such a fracture in media environment that even someone like Ronald Reagan, who you worked for would have to do more of what you're seeing the President do in this environment.

Noonan: Oh I don't know. I think the President is doing what he's doing now, being all over today and the past few weeks--he's doing it because... he can, because people do what they know how to do.

Stephanopoulos: Because no one is going to turn him down.

Noonan: This is his way. Because everybody will say yes. I don't think it's about the media environment but I do think the media environment allows a modern leader to be something subtly damaging and that is boorish. They get their face in your face every day all the time. It's boorish and it makes people not lean towards you, but lean away from you, no matter what the merits of the issue and the merits of this issue are not such great merits.

[.....]

You know what I think. When I look at this I step back a little bit and I think there is a lot of anger now. Mrs. Pelosi had a point. Things get high. It's always good to cool things down, but essentially what we have here is a very new president. He's only been here for ten months. He is a young man. He didn't have deep, long, profound experience. He is attempting right now to change, what it is, seventeen, eighteen percent of the GNP of the United States of America, changing how it works, health care.

This is problematic on the face of it. People will argue about that, but on top of that people are thinking about, in America the economy, unemployment, war and peace, two wars that are going. This president who is new and young comes along and says "Oh, that's not the issue. The issue is health care". It seems not like a program but a non sequitur and it angers people.

Inland at DailyKOS reminds of us what the definition of a boor is and tries to figure out what Noonan may have been implying by using the term.

boor definition boor (bo̵or)

noun

1. Archaic a peasant or farm worker

2. a rude, awkward, or ill-mannered person

Inland also points to this post at Firedoglake by Blue Texan with more of Noonan's hackery on the town hall protesters. Peggy Noonan: Health Care Protests Haven’t “Gotten Out of Hand”, Just “Plenty of Booing”:

Nooners surveys the mob scenes, the hangings in effigy, the assaults, the unhinged rhetoric -- and blames it all on Obama.

All of this is unnecessarily and unhelpfully divisive and provocative. They [the White House and Democrats] are mocking and menacing concerned citizens. This only makes a hot situation hotter. Is this what the president wants? It couldn’t be. But then in an odd way he sometimes seems not to have fully absorbed the awesome stature of his office. You really, if you’re president, can’t call an individual American stupid, if for no other reason than that you’re too big. You cannot allow your allies to call people protesting a health-care plan “extremists” and “right wing,” or bought, or Nazi-like, either. They’re citizens. They’re concerned. They deserve respect.

Shorter Noonan: if the Democrats would stop dressing like slutty socialists, they wouldn't get raped.

h/t to Bob Cesca who also noted..

Adding... Peggy Noonan was at the top of her passive aggressive condescending game. Bravo. Referring to the president as "boorish" in her trademark insufferable hushed tone doesn't make her "graceful" or "civil" -- it just makes her look ridiculous, since she clearly doesn't know what "boorish" means.

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Mary Landrieu on This Week with George Stephanopoulos defending the "need" to keep the private insurance system in place. Would somebody please ask one of these politicians just what value the industry provides to the American public? They do nothing but move money around and skim 30% off the top for doing it. And then do their best not to pay out benefits after they've got their take. Of course we know why. The amount of money pouring into campaign coffers. That and enriching Wall Street.

Jello Jay Rockefeller still is strongly in favor of having a public option and explains why he thinks it's one way to keep the insurance industries costs in check in this segment. I think we need single payer, but we're going to need to vote out about half the members of Congress for any hope of that ever happening.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So what's the problem with the public health option?

LANDRIEU: Well, many of us believe, George, that it will undermine the private insurance system. And that's one of the criticism of the direction that the House of Representatives took. Because 55 percent of those covered with insurance today are covered through a private insurance model, 45 percent are covered through a public model.

So, many of us would like to take the president at his word, which is, let's not completely revise the whole system. Let's build on the strengths.

Now I'm with Jay in the sense that if we can find a middle ground here, where we can keep insurance honest, regulate insurance companies, no American supports unregulated insurance companies, so that there is competition in the market, we can maybe achieve the goal through a different way.

STEPHANOPOULOS: One of the different ways that has been talked about, and then I want to move on to other subjects, is this proposal put forward by Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine, which would say, let's give some time to see if the president's health insurance reforms work to bring down costs, increase competition, if not, then we'll have a trigger which will set the public option a few years down the road.

LANDRIEU: And I have to say, I think both Jay and I can agree that what Democrats want -- and I'm hoping that some Republicans will join us in this effort and not just leave Americans out there with a too-expensive system that they have and a system that's going to crash and burn shortly if we don't do anything.

I hope that we can agree that we've got to have a reformed market where individuals can buy insurance that's affordable. Where small businesses get a chance. These small businesses, 27 million of them, George, are basically out on their own.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So can you support the Snowe trigger?

LANDRIEU: I can support potentially a fallback, but only if the private sector is allowed and given a great opportunity to get this right. I believe they can.

STEPHANOPOULOS: How about you?

ROCKEFELLER: I think that's too easy an answer with all...

LANDRIEU: That's OK.

ROCKEFELLER: Lots of love.

(LAUGHTER)

ROCKEFELLER: I mean, I said I didn't think there were any good alternatives. And if you're not going to vote for something, then you have to do something about insurance, because they have been very rapacious about ripping off consumers. We have done a lot of work on that to show that, and had whistleblowers come forward.

But I'm not dispassionate on the public option.

STEPHANOPOULOS: You're going to keep fighting?

ROCKEFELLER: Yes, I am going to keep fighting, because it's probably not going to attract more than -- it will probably attract less than 5 percent of the American population. And, you know, Tim -- the governor will say, it's going to track over 100 million. It won't. It won't.

But it's an option. And the very fact that it is there says to the other insurance companies, hey, if we don't bring our costs down, because the public option doesn't have -- they just live on their own premiums...

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On This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Matthew Dowd tries to equate the left's hatred for George Bush with the over the top attack by the right wing about Obama's speech to school children. I'm sorry Matt, but it's not the same thing.

As Digby pointed out in her post where she talks about the media fueling this nonsense, there is a difference.

I know how she feels. I had the same reaction when George W. Bush was on television every five minute launching invasions of other countries for no good reason and yammering on about how oceans once protected us and now drone planes with biological weapons were coming to kill us all in our beds. It's easy to understand why this woman would be equally freaked out by the president trying to make sure everyone can go to a doctor when they get sick. It's scary stuff.

There's a part of all this that's simply a matter of the right riding the existing zeitgeist. For years liberals loudly denounced the neocons for their megalomania, warning about the ramifications of an America that has become a rogue superpower, torturing, invading and spying on its own citizens. It was a violent, frightening time with some real world consequences that are still not fully understood or absorbed.

The right, with their pretense of assuming the moral positions of their opposition, twisting their rhetoric to suit their own needs and basically use the other sides' own methods against them, have simply jumped on the bandwagon now that their boy is gone. These people are posing as civil libertarians afraid of an authoritarian take-over,something we all have felt recently. Because they've absorbed all the fear and concern of the past years, even as they rejected it, they are now able to emotionally apply it to the president they hate and it has the same emotional resonance, even if it is completely ludicrous.

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Katrina Vanden Heuvel does a pretty good job of talking about how all of this is being fanned by "a right wing media that wants to cripple or take down Obama's presidency" and how we didn't see this when President's Reagan and George H.W. Bush spoke to school children, and then Dowd follows with this.

Dowd: Well it reminds me, to be honest it reminds me of exactly what the left was doing to George W. Bush in this time. There was no way no matter what he said, how he did, whatever he talked about that they would accept, react to well at all, no matter what he did. And the same is happening to Barack Obama.

In Matthew Dowd's world, the left being upset about being lied into war, the spying, the torture, stolen elections, using 9-11 to scare the crap out of the American public, tax breaks for the rich who don't need it, using the Department of Justice as a political arm of the White House and getting a Governor thrown into jail, outing a CIA agent because her husband dared to speak out against Dick Cheney, putting industry hacks in charge of every government oversight agency, and I could go on but I'll stop... being upset about those things is exactly the same as the right wing freaking out over a speech given to school children by President Obama. I don't think so.

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I'm not sure what's more infuriating here, listening to Orrin Hatch pretend he doesn't know full well that what was done to the prisoners in our custody was torture, or John Kerry defending the Obama administration's decision not to go after the ones at the top who ordered it, and then smile and nod politely while Hatch spins.

STEPHANOPOULOS: OK. Let me move to another issue that came up earlier this week. The attorney general decided to investigate possible CIA abuses in the prisoner interrogation cases.

And Vice President Cheney this morning has blasted that decision by the attorney general.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DICK CHENEY, FORMER VICE PRESIDENT: The approach of the Obama administration should be to come to those people who were involved in that policy and say, how did you do it? What were the keys to keeping the country safe over that period of time?

Instead, they're out there now threatening to disbar the lawyers who gave us the legal opinions, threatening, contrary to what the president originally said, they were going to go out and investigate the CIA personnel who carried out those investigations.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

STEPHANOPOULOS: He called it an outrageous and possibly dangerous act.

KERRY: Well, Dick Cheney has shown through the years, frankly, a disrespect for the Constitution, for sharing of information with Congress, respect for the law, and I'm not surprised that he is upset about this.

The Obama administration has no intention -- I think the president himself has been unbelievably bending in the direction of trying to be careful about what happens to national security, protecting our national security interests, being very sensitive about the CIA's prerogatives and needs and so forth.

And in fact, I think there is a little bit of a tension between the White House itself and the lawyers in the Justice Department as they see the law and as what their obligation is.

And in a sense, that's good. That's appropriate, because it shows that we have an attorney general who is not pursuing a political agenda, but who is doing what he believes the law requires him to do.

And we have an administration, on the other hand, that is balancing some of those other interests.

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Paul Krugman and Robert Reich both made some really great points during the panel discussion on This Week on the reasons for some real reform of the insurance industry, the mistakes made by the President in negotiating with the Senate, and the notion that there is a need for bipartisanship when the Republican party has moved so far out of the mainstream. And this statement by Krugman bears noting:

Krugman: Well, the public option again, this is something, that, there’s a question whether they're for it, or whether, are they willing to actually vote against cloture to stop this really quite modest but helpful piece of the reform being in there? (crosstalk) They have no intellectual basis to stand on, right? The argument against the public option is sheer nonsense. We know that. It's nothing except the insurance lobby.

Exactly. If these conserva-Dems want to block health care reform and getting the insurance industries in check, make them actually have to stand up and filibuster it along with the Republicans and show their true colors.

Transcript below the fold.

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Paul Krugman calls out John McCain for his double talk on controlling Medicare costs during this panel discussion with George Stephanopoulos on This Week. As Krugman notes, the Republicans and John McCain are trying to have it both ways and one one hand saying Medicare's costs need to be kept in check, and on the other hand scaring seniors into thinking that the President wants to cut their Medicare benefits, and refusing to have a rational debate on how those costs end up being controlled.

David Frum tries to defend the Medicare Advantage program which is one of the things the Obama administration wants to go after to control costs, and Krugman shoots a hole straight through his arguments and reminds him that wasteful spending is what Republicans are supposed to be against. George Will wraps things up with showing his love for the pharmaceutical industry and their profits.

WILL: We’ve been talking about this for about five minutes and the subject of cost, which is tiresome and depressing, has not come up.

REICH: I just mentioned it.

WILL: When we began this debate a few months ago, the costs were going to be paid primarily by two things. One, the proceeds from selling under cap and trade, the permits to emit carbon. And “B,” Medicare cuts. “B” is never going to happen. And we’ve given away what should have been sold, or so we say, the rights to emit carbon. Where are we going to pay for this?

KRUGMAN: Medicare stuff, I think, will, in fact, happen if anything passes. If you want to think about the utter, utter hypocrisy of the Republicans on this. We just heard John McCain . And early on in your conversation, he said basically Sarah Palin was right in saying death panels because the Democrats want Medicare to take into account the actual medical effectiveness --

STEPHANOPOULOS: They weren’t in support of the policy.

KRUGMAN: Right. And then later in the same conversation, he said, we have a terrible problem with entitlements with Medicare. We really need to do something to cut Medicare spending. And what possible way -- we should cut Medicare spending without any regard for the medical effectiveness of what it’s paying for? So, this is, you know, we have the Republicans actually standing fully against any sort of rational control of costs.

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John McCain thinks it's just amazing that a Colonel decided to volunteer for his sixth, yes, his sixth tour of duty in Iraq. Isn't that wonderful? Incredible in McCain's words. Well, I agree, but not for the same reason McCain does. It horribly incredible that anyone is over there for a sixth tour of duty.

I agree with Thom Hartmann who thinks that Afghanistan is going to be Obama's Vietnam if we don't get the hell out of there. Any time I hear Mr. "I Know How to Win Wars" John McCain agreeing with the President on anything I figure we're pretty well screwed.

Stephanopoulos points out the strain this is putting on the enlisted military and their families, but that doesn't seem to phase McCain and his insistence that somehow our military can sustain that kind of prolonged presence in the region.

STEPHANOPOULOS: How do you answer the argument, though, of others who say that adding more troops now to Afghanistan is a fool's errand in nation-building? That we can achieve the goal of denying a safe haven to al Qaeda by letting the Afghan government take the lead and taking them out with drones when necessary?

MCCAIN: Well, I say with respect, and I understand that argument, but that was the same argument under Rumsfeld and Casey that didn't work. I think the fundamental to success of a counterinsurgency is to clear and hold and secure an environment for people so that the political and economic progress can be made.

STEPHANOPOULOS: That's a 40-year effort, isn't it?

MCCAIN: I think within a year to 18 months you could start to see progress. It's very hard. It's very tough. We're facing a very determined enemy that will stand and fight in some instances that are very adaptable, and obviously with safe havens in Pakistan.

But as the president described it in the campaign, this is a good war and one that we have to win. And I think he'll hold to that.

STEPHANOPOULOS: We're seeing now that the American public is turning against the war.

MCCAIN: Yes.

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One of the common wingnut accusations about Democratic hypocrisy because they opposed Mike (who was then suddenly called Miguel) Estrada is that Democrats refused to give give him a fair hearing. On This Week today, Chuck Schumer responds:

STEPHANOPOULOS: Senator Schumer, how do you respond to this charge of hypocrisy and double standards? You led the charge against Miguel Estrada when he was trying to -- when he was nominated for the appeals court. There were internal memos among Democrats, citing as one possible reason the fact that he would be an Hispanic elevated to the appeals court. Are you using a different standard for Judge Sotomayor than you used for Mr. Estrada?

SCHUMER: Absolutely not, and let me explain why. First, Estrada was never a judge, so we had no way to judge what his record would be in the best way to judge it, cases that we had ruled on. And so when we asked him questions, he said absolutely nothing. He said, I cannot answer this question, I cannot answer that question. In fact, Judge Sotomayor has answered more questions on hearings already, because of her two confirmation hearings, than Estrada said. So we had totally nothing to do on with Estrada.

What we said about Miguel Estrada is, if he talked a little bit about his judicial philosophy, we could give him a fair hearing. He absolutely refused. He had no record as a judge. The two standards are like night and day.

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