sen. bob graham on meet the press at 12 cdt. should i stay up?

missed it earlier.

unless you love the sound of Salamander Gingrich talking.

He dominated the show. There was no reason to have him on it, as far as I could see.

i found myself agreeing with buchannon alot...but not much on the saudi-911 connection.

MR. RUSSERT: ...with you and our viewers and give a chance for our group to respond to it. "U.S. dominance of the Middle East is not the corrective to terror. It is a cause of terror. Were were not over there, the 9/11 terrorists would not have been over here. And while their acts were murderous and despicable, behind their atrocities lay a political motive. We were attacked because of our imperial presence on the sacred soil of the land of Mecca and Medina, because of our enemies' perception that we were strangling the Iraqi people with sanctions and preparing to attack a second time, and because of our uncritical support of the Likud regime of Ariel Sharon" in Israel.

Are you suggesting that our alliance with Israel is one of the reasons that we were attacked on September 11?

MR. BUCHANAN: Sure. That's one of the reasons given by Osama bin Laden. In his fatwa of 1998, he wrote that there are three causes of the problems and three causes for a declaration of war by all Arabs and good Muslims against the United States. One, America's imperial presence on the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia. Secondly, the sanctions policy against Iraq which was persecuting and basically starving, he said, the Iraqi people, and we were planning another invasion. Third is the United States' uncritical support of the Ariel Sharon regime in Israel, which he argued is persecuting the Palestinian people.
In my judgment, Chris, this one-sided support for Sharon, the refusal to condemn that wall snaking through the West Bank, the agreement to support Sharon's claim to virtually half of the West Bank, this has caused enormous hostility and animosity and hatred for this country in that part of the world, not just among the Palestinians. And if we want to drain off some of this hatred, this venom against us, we have got to adopt a more evenhanded policy here. We have got to stand up for the same rights for the Palestinian people, a homeland, a nation, a state of their own, a viable one, on the land their forefathers farmed for a thousand years, because those are first our principles and secondly, that is in the national interest of the United States of America. I don't care what Ariel Sharon believes.

Gingrich doesn't get much time. Buchanan was the most informative, IMO.

this stuff is approaching the "T word"...treason, he was suggesting that there were treasonous acts.

Slimey Newt tried to spin everything, worrying about "smearing" and destroying careers....

I watched the msn report instead. I discovered the above line. I think I quoted it.