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Tim Russert's Purpose in Life

A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION
by Donald P. Russo

For the last handful of holdouts who may have harbored any doubt about Tim Russert’s purpose in life, we now know for certain: He is a bought and paid for Republican corporate shill placed there to do the bidding of his masters, Jack Welch [GE's former CEO] and George W. Bush. What a truly reprehensible and loathsome human being this guy Russert is. It was sad, truly sad, to watch the once-venerable and once-respected program Meet the Press this Sunday as it was being usurped in a seedy and sordid effort to grind away at the credibility of Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard, a man who had the temerity to accuse Bush’s federal government of wrongdoing during Hurricane Katrina.

Fortunately, Broussard is not a panty-waisted Washington Democrat, and he was not afraid to go toe to toe with the corpulent Bush defender, Mr. Russert, all the while giving as good as he got. When the fifteen rounds were over, I scored most of the rounds as going to Broussard.

Russert kept referring to “bloggers” who had criticized the timing of Broussard’s story about the death of an assistant’s mother. So this is where the great NBC News organization gets its information these days: From nut job right wing blogger nerds sitting in their parents’ basements, plucking away at the keyboard of an old computer. Sorry Tim, but you made me laugh, and laugh out loud. Aren’t these the same whackos whose muddled and malicious “Swiftboat” internet meanderings you allowed to besmirch John Kerry last fall?

At long last, are there no limits to the depths into which you will plunge when your beloved Bush is being challenged? It is amazing that you will devote the lavish resources of an entire news network in a puerile attempt to grind down the credibility of one little overworked and exhausted local official in the Deep South. It was a sad, pathetic day for what is left of NBC News.

You are no longer kidding anyone. We all know that you have been transmogrified into a somewhat less embarrassing version of Rush Limbaugh, albeit a slightly (note I said slightly) less corpulent version, without the bad cigar breath and the madcap, oxycontin inspired rants. But you are fooling no one with your feigned veneer of objectivity and sanity. You are a bought and paid for Republican corporate shill. If your handler, Jack Welch, and his right wing bully boys at General Electric didn’t run the show at NBC, you would have been fired a long time ago. Tell your staff to stop reading those right wing internet blogs, and start trying to figure out what in the hell Bush has got us into in Iraq.

Or, if your staff is looking for fun stuff to track down, how about tracking down that nine billion dollars that Paul Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority “lost” in Iraq?

Yes indeed, how far the mighty have fallen, Tim. When I was a little kid, my parents would watch Meet the Press on Sunday afternoons. Jack Kennedy, Adlai Stevenson, Martin Luther King and Golda Meir were the caliber of guests on the program in those days, and they were questioned by hosts who were true journalists, concerned about getting the truth, not simply carrying water for right wing corporate fascists and unidentified “bloggers.”

You have disgraced yourself irreparably, Mr. Russert. You owe Mr. Broussard an apology. And I, for one, am hereby issuing a call to all progressive bloggers to dig out every single detail about the death of the woman in question, and to bombard NBC News with e-mailed facts about the untimely death of this poor woman.

Tim, you know damn well that after 911 every manner, shape and form of disaster management in this country was completely federalized and aggrandized by Bush and Ashcroft, that is the historical record. Stop trying to help Bush by passing on the blame to the locals; you are disgracing yourself sir.

All progressives must keep up the pressure to get Mr. Broussard back on Meet the Press again, and this time we will arm him with all of the specific facts, so he won’t be ambushed by the likes of the smarmy Mr. Russert. The Bush administration is so obsessed with blaming the Katrina debacle on local officials in Louisiana that they are willing to exploit to the fullest their controlled media assets --like Tim Russert -- to carry out these Karl Rove-inspired perfidies.

Donald P. Russo
Bethlehem, PA

[For another interesting take on Russert's attack of Broussard see Tim Russert's Effective Ambush (Joe Gandelman/The Moderate Voice. Or, go to "Aaron Broussard Responds" at Crooks and Liars.]

A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION