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September 24, 2007

Special Report Roundtable - Sep. 25

FOX News Special Report With Brit Hume

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

LEE BOLLINGER, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESIDENT: Mr. President, you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator. You are either brazenly provocative, or astonishingly uneducated.

Today I feel all the weight of the modern civilized world yearning to express the revulsion at what you stand for. I only wish I could do better. Thank you.

MAHMOUD AHMADINEJAD, IRANIAN PRESIDENT: In Iran, we do not think it is necessary before the speech is even given to come in with a series of claims.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HUME: So Columbia University President Lee Bollinger really whips it on Ahmadinejad before he speaks and gets applause. And Ahmadinejad says in Iran we don't do that and gets bigger applause. It is all part of the festivities today up at Columbia and some other venues as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad enjoyed the American spotlight.

And there is one more thing I want everyone to see before we discuss all this, and that was what Senator Clinton said today when she was asked what she thought of the decision of Columbia President Bollinger to have the guy at Columbia. Watch this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN HILLARY CLINTON, (D) NEW YORK: What I have said is that if I were the president of the university I would not have invited him, but I did not express an opinion about the decision made by Columbia.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HUME: Huh?

Anyway, some thoughts on all this from Mort Kondracke, Executive Editor of Roll Call, Mara Liasson, National Political Correspondent for National Public Radio, and the syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer, Fox News contributors all.

It was a lively day. What did you think, Mort?

MORT KONDRACKE, EXECUTIVE EDITOR, ROLL CALL: Well, I basically agree with President Bush that it was not a big deal. Ahmadinejad went there. I don't think he scored any great propaganda points--

HUME: How did it go, in your judgment?

KONDRACKE: At the event, itself, I thought Bollinger was on his way to delivering a wonderful indictment of all the things that are evil about Iran under Ahmadinejad. Then he went off into the insult realm, and just, as we saw, in that case--there is a factual case, which he started to make, about all the repression of students, of homosexuals, and stuff like that.

And I thought Ahmadinejad got himself caught with those students in particular, by saying "We don't have homosexuals in Iran."

HUME: He didn't say that until much later, though. What about Bollinger and the response to it that we saw the reaction to?

KONDRACKE: I think that there were two cliques there, and the applause represented the two cliques. There was a pro-Ahmadinejad clique, and an anti--

HUME: What does it say, Mara, about an American university like Columbia that there is a pro- Ahmadinejad clique that's large enough to make a big portion of the audience?

MARA LIASSON, NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO, NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: It is hard for me to tell if there was a pro- Ahmadinejad clique or an anti-U.S. But it was unclear if they were cheering his criticisms of the United States or they were thrilled about him.

However, he did say a lot of astounding things--journalists have not been sentenced to death, there is now women that are freer than the women in Iran, we have no homosexuals.

KONDRACKE: I love the Jewish people.

LIASSON: But he also did say, which was interesting, and James Rosen pointed this out earlier, that he said it happened in Europe, meaning the holocaust.

Now he pretty came close to acknowledging that it happened, which is a step forward for him. But I do not think he scored a lot propaganda points. And just watching the applause, it does not seem like they were cheering him necessarily.

HUME: How do you know that? How can you tell?

LIASSON: I couldn't.

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST: I thought on the initial exchange the President of Iran got it right. In his part of the world, if you invite someone into your tent, you do not insult them. And the original sin her was asking him into your tent.

Bollinger, I think, had to actually be tough on the guy because otherwise he was going to be turning in disgrace the invitation into a travesty, which would have been not challenging him.

But he should never have had him, and not because you cannot have a guy like him speaking anywhere. He didn't score any points, he didn't advance his cause in anyway. It is a disgrace on the university.

The university has a purpose, it is not just a forum for anybody. You do not have an exchange of whether the earth is flat. You do not have an exchange with a guy that denies everywhere else and that the holocaust did not happen.

And, as was mentioned last, he actually held a cartoon contest in Tehran, an open exhibit, on cartoons mocking the holocaust. It was now just a denial, it was rubbing it in, and it is a disgraceful approach to one of the great tragedies in human history.

You do not have a guy on a great campus. That was the problem. Ahmadinejad did not end up ahead, but Columbia ended up way behind.

KONDRACKE: I think there is a great opportunity for the Bush administration here. On "60 Minutes" he specifically denied over and over again supplying any weapons to be used against American troops in Iraq.

Here is an opportunity to come out with the evidence and say this man is a flat out liar, and there is evidence.

HUME: Does anybody have any doubt about that? That he is a flat out liar?

KONDRACKE: No, but I think exposing him as a flat out liar immediately would have been a great thing to do.

HUME: In other words, you remain unconvinced--

KONDRACKE: No, I am totally convinced of it. But I think that before the world, when he makes a flat statement, producing the proof that he is a flat out liar is a good thing to do.

HUME: Well, he said that there are no homosexuals in Iran. That's a self-evident lied?

KONDRACKE: A self-evident lie, including the fact that some of them have been hanged. You can find pictures on the internet of two homosexuals being hanged a month ago.

KRAUTHAMMER: He was asked about the execution of homosexuals, and he said in his response in regard to executions, he spoke about "Don't you in America and Europe and Turkey execute people--"

HUME: What he meant was--I think I figure it out--that we don't have any left.

KRAUTHAMMER: What he meant is if you poison the youth, we hang you. And he defines being gay as a poisoning his culture, and, in effect, he answered that question.

HUME: And, of course, he was distinctly booed at one point, and that was when he said we have no homosexuals in Iran, that got him a round of boos.

KRAUTHAMMER: Right. You can excoriate Jews, America, Bush, western society, and you get applause on campus. But if you say something politically incorrect about gays, you get booed.

HUME: When we come back with our panel, Hilary-care 2.0--a great idea or another political malady? Stay tuned.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CHRIS WALLACE, FOX NEWS HOST: Senator, you talk, as you just did, a lot about choice in your, but the fact is you still have sweeping government mandates.

CLINTON: Well, there is certainly a shared responsibility that goes with having a health care system that both can afford to provide quality, affordable health care for everyone and puts responsibility on everyone in our country.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HUME: Chris Wallace, part of a question from him, and a piece of Hillary Rodham Clinton's answer from Fox News Sunday about her new health care program, which has now had a few days to be out there and let people look it over and think about it, and let her talk about it as well.

So what is the net political effect of this plan, Mort?

KONDRACKE: It has gotten very good reviews. And to some extent it deserves the reviews because she is covering the 47 million uninsured people in the country. And it is almost--

HUME: Whether they want to be insured or not, in some cases.

KONDRACKE: Yes, exactly. And the point of that is that young people who are healthy and think that they will never get sick do not buy health insurance, and if they were--

HUME: Which is a reasonable calculation on their part, wouldn't you say.

KONDRACKE: Yes, on their part. But if they were insured, if they had to be injured, it would lower the premiums for everybody because they are healthy and younger, and they don't get sick as often.

HUME: So, they don't get anything out of it, really.

KONDRACKE: Well, they do if they get sick. So that is a good reason why it seems to be they should be insured.

HUME: So, they're making a mistake by not being insured.

KONDRACKE: They are acting in their self-interest, but everyone is required to have Social Security cards, too, and auto insurance, and so on.

The problem with the Hillary plan will be revealed in the details. She has got a Medicare style choice that she wants to offer people. You could dream up a scenario, and it is not too difficult, whereby ultimately the only choice that anyone would want would be the Medicare choice, in which case you have a Canadian style single payer plan. That is the danger of this plan.

And Hillary has the record of being leery or even hostile to private insurance and private markets, and one would be worried that that is where she's going.

HUME: If not in this plan than some subsequent installment.

LIASSON: But one thing tat she has said is that is going to leave the details up to Congress, unlike the first time when she wrote this incredibly detailed plan that suck of its own weight once it was picked apart. And she says that finally she has learned from the first time.

And we know what she is planning to propose because she has laid it out, but we do not know what she is planning to insist on or bargain away.

I think the significant thing about the health care debate right now is that all the Democrats have a universal health care plan. They are very similar to Hillary's--hers is not that different than Edwards. The difference with Obama is he doesn't have an individual mandate.

But the Democrats are unified in saying that universal health care is the gold. The Republicans have not said that, and that, I think, is where the big health care debate stands.

If Republicans want to attack the Democrats' plans and Hillary's plans as saying it is not fair to make someone have insurance if they're young and healthy, they can take their stand there. But I don't know if that is the most fruitful way to do it.

KRAUTHAMMER: But that mandate on the young is an example of how Hillary style modern liberalism works. It learned from LBJ that if you tax and institute a government program, people are upset.

What you do now is you don't tax because it is obvious. What you do is you hide the costs and hide the tax in a mandate. And the mandate is that young people who, rationally, are not insured now, weighing the risks and the benefits, would be forced into a plan, essentially subsidizing others.

Now, you can argue it is a good idea, you want to socialize the cost. But then you want to say openly we want to force people into a system in which everybody is provided with socialized health care, mandated by the government, and subsidized by those who do not need it.

That is an option. But what you try to do if you are a modern liberal is to hide it in the mandate instead of doing it in the tax.

KONDRACKE: But she is saying that this is an individual mandate, and if that does not mean required I do not know what does. I do not think she is hiding the fact--

KRAUTHAMMER: She should increase the taxes as a way of doing this.

HUME: She is doing that anyway by repealing the Bush tax cuts.

KRAUTHAMMER: But it is hiding all of the cost, or a lot of it, in a mandate, which makes it largely invisible.

KONDRACKE: I think the Republicans ought to be judged on how big a dent can they make in the 47 million uninsured, especially in the low end?

LIASSON: The different is she covers everybody and Republicans do not.

HUME: That's it for the panel, but stay tuned to say to see what happened when journalists pursuing O.J. Simpson think they caught him.

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