Bob Schieffer, friend to the GOP, is a moron

By Michael J.W. Stickings

I know, I know. It's hardly groundbreaking to highlight the ignorance and incompetence of the Beltway media. We do it a lot here, and there are many, many others who do the same, including some of the finest and most essential voices in the blogosphere. The media give us a lot of material, after all, and, well, it's just so easy.

And so important. Because some in the Beltway media are not just ignorant and incompetent, they're ignorant and incompetent with a pro-Republican agenda. Or, at least, their ignorance and incompetence serves to advance the Republican agenda. This is how Republican propaganda becomes an essential ingredient in the dominant narratives of the Beltway media, the narratives that are spun out to America, much of which is too ignorant, or just too apathetic, to know the difference.

Take Bob Schieffer, for example, one of the most senior of Beltway media figures. On Face the Nation on Sunday, Schieffer, whose closeness to the Bushies has long been established, exposed himself as a moron... again. And there was no excuse. He should have known better.

The issue was reconcilation and health-care reform, and Democratic Sen. Kent Conrad tried to explain that not the entirely of the reform bill would be passed through reconcilation, just certain budget-related elements. Simple enough, but Schieffer didn't get it. Or got it and didn't care, preferring to twist Conrad's words and to feed the Republican guest, Rep. Marsha Blackburn -- and thereby to advance the Republican narrative as the way it supposedly really is.

Jonathan Chait posts the key part of the transcript here. It's fairly long, but here's a key part:

SCHIEFFER: Let me just throw this in because I'm not sure the White House has the same understanding of this that you do. Because the woman, Nancy DeParle, who is, kind of, in charge of Medicare over there at the White House -- I mean, health care, over there at the White House, said this morning on "Meet the Press" she thought that an up-or-down vote would be the way to go on this.

So, obviously, she's talking about trying to do it through reconciliation, Senator.

CONRAD: I'd say this to you, Bob. I have said all year, I am chairman of the committee in the Senate; I think I understand how reconciliation works and how it can't work. The major package of health care reform cannot move through the reconciliation process. It will not work.

SCHIEFFER: It will not work?

CONRAD: It will not work because of the Byrd rule which says anything that doesn't score for budget purposes has to be eliminated. That would eliminate all the delivery system reform, all the insurance market reform, all of those things the experts tell us are really the most important parts of this bill.

The only possible role that I can see for reconciliation would be make modest changes in the major package to improve affordability, to deal with what share of Medicaid expansion the federal government pays, those kinds of issues, which is the traditional role for reconciliation in health care.

Conrad didn't do a great job explaining how reconciliation would be used, and for what, but it's clear that he knows what he's talking about and that Schieffer was pushing an alternative view based on misunderstanding or willful misrepresentation.

Does anyone actually remember that both the House and the Senate (with 60 votes) passed reform bills? It's not like they have to go back to square one. The plan -- a very reasonable one (and not at all a perversion of the American way of life and self-government, as Republicans and their media mouthpieces are claiming -- is for the House to pass the Senate bill and for the Senate, through reconcilation, to pass fairly minor patches to improve the bill. That's it. That's what Conrad was saying, and it's what Schieffer and Blackburn either didn't get or pretended not to get.

As Chait opines:

Look, it would be okay for reporters and pundits to be obsessed with what legislative method is employed to pass health care reform if they boned up on the issue. Alternatively, it would be okay for them not to understand it at all if they deemed it an irrelevant issue. (Which, in my opinion, it is.) But obsessed and ignorant makes for a bad combination. 

It was an appalling performance by Schieffer, though hardly an unexpected one. He was just being himself, after all, and like so many of his colleagues.