Payne Full Viewing

I saw something truly horrific on TV yesterday and I'm not talking about Britney Spears' embarrassing "comeback" bid -- although the still photographs suggest that it wasn't too easy on the eye. (BTW, Brit, when you're the subject of ridicule -- it's over.)

No, I watching the News Hour with Jim Lehrer. In a change of pace, he interviewed four backbench Congressional representatives rather than the usual suspects. One of them was Donald Payne, a Democrat from New Jersey, who appears to be incapable of an original or intelligent thought regarding the situation in Iraq. To wit:

JIM LEHRER: Congressman Payne, you want a different kind, a larger, a quicker withdrawal than what General Petraeus is suggesting?

REP. DONALD PAYNE: Definitely. The American people want it, too. That's why they elected a majority of Democrats in the House and the Senate in the past election.

You see, the problem was that General Petraeus did not get us into this war. Had he been in charge, perhaps there would have been a different outcome. We were to find weapons of mass destruction. Then it was said, "Well, it's regime change." Now it's that we have to fight al-Qaida, and there were none of them there in Iraq before. They're in Iraq so we don't have to fight them in the United States.

So we see a continual change of why we had the preemptive strike in the first place. And I still even hear, as much as I respect my friend, Representative Wilson, when we get the stretch about 9/11 being perpetrated on us by Saddam Hussein in Iraq. That is wrong, and we continue to try to say that that's what happened.

To these ears, it seemed like a replay of 2004 Presidential election talking points. Putting aside the fact that he failed to answer the question, it appears that Mr. Payne was coached on some of the well-worn (and somewhat dubious) Democratic talking points if for no other reason than to change the focus from General Petraseus' presentation. I'm sure Mr. Payne does wonders for his constituents, but they didn't elect a foreign policy heavyweight.

To his credit, Mr. Lehrer, gently nudged Mr. Payne to respond to his question for a quicker pullout than that proposed by the administration due to the geo-strategic rationale of that's what the American people want.

Mr. Payne's fellow Democrat, Lynn Woolsey from California, didn't seem to be any more enlightened when she noted:

REP. LYNN WOOLSEY: Well, my reaction to both of them is that they're talking about, "Stay the course." And we've heard these stories over and over. And Congressman Payne said the different reasons why we're there, the different missions.

You cannot win an occupation. This is what we're doing: We're occupying a foreign country. We need to give that country back to the Iraqis, give them back their sovereignty, give them back their oil rights, help them in a non-militaristic way later.

But in the meantime, we don't just pull our troops out. We plan and work with them and make sure they come home safely and in an orderly fashion, because that's what the people of this country want.

Listening to her, one gets the idea that "occupation" is a bad word like "neo-conservative" and should be used in describing America's role in Iraq. Trust me, if this was truly an occupation, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

Of note, though is their repetition of what the American people want -- conveniently failing to mention what would happen if troops were to precipitously depart from Iraq.

On second thought, it seems that Britney Spears wasn't the only who made a fool of herself yesterday.