From Wednesday’s Special Report All-Star Panel Appearance

On an executive order restricting agencies’ spending on “SWAG” :

As the president said, waste — large and small. This is small. This is mugs, t-shirts, and other trinkets. I am all for saving money on that, but it will take a lot of t-shirts to pay off $15 trillion of debt.
This goes under the heading of “appearance of motion” — a president who has no idea what to do about unemployment or our debt (perhaps he knows what to do about the debt, but he has no intention of doing it, particularly in an election year) giving the appearance of motion. [Alleged] student loans, housing [relief], and now waste and abuse in the government. It’s all show. There is no substance here.

On bonuses for the executives of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac:

I’m not scandalized about the bonuses. If it were the guys who destroyed Fannie and Freddie, I would be scandalized.
These are people who came afterwards. These are the cleaners-uppers. If you want to have the best people, you are going to have to be at least competitive with what is offered in the private sector. These people are managing tens of billions of dollars of our money. I’d rather it be in good hands than have to scrape and find people who work at the minimum wage and have the money wasted. It’s important.
If they can be replaced by $1-a-year man — plutocrats who worked in the Second World War — I’d welcome them. I don’t see any here on a volunteering list.

On the recent IAEA report on Iran’s nuclear program:

What is important in the IAEA report is the weaponization part. To build a nuke you have to do three things. You have to enrich [uranium], that’s number one. You to have a delivery system, which the Iranians ahave worked on, on missiles. And the third, you have to weaponize. You have to find a way to make the bomb adaptable on top of the missile, so it can explode.
And that’s where the IAEA has important information of stuff that can only be explained if Iran is trying to weaponize. And it [Iran] only would be weaponizing if it’s actually in pursuit of a nuke.
And that’s where I think it’s extremely important, because we had our own intelligence report in 2007 which said, erroneously — and it was obvious at the time that it was erroneous — that Iran had stopped its weaponization. Well, now we have from a U.N. source, of all places, a report that says the opposite. And that is alarming.
What is most alarming is the tepid response of the State Department spokesman [who] said: we have to make it clear that Iran has to come clean.
As if Iran is regular nation, not a rogue state. [As if] it will admit: we lied all the years and we want to come clean….
Obama imagined he could sweet talk the mullahs into giving up nukes, and that is why he said nothing in the antigovernment revolution in 2009. Then he imagined he could reset relations with Russia, give up the missile defenses, [thinking that] in return he gets cooperation from Iran.
He got nothing. So here he is with no weapons, with no program. All he can do is have spokesman saying: we urge Iran to come clean….
The diplomacy of the administration on this has been an abject and complete failure. That is why all that we can do [that] is rally the Western allies — and it looks as if even that the administration is not able to do.