I know, I know, nobody watches Hardball anyway, but I just thought I would point out the transcript of Coleen Rowley’s miserable performance last night. Rowley got her 15 minutes of fame by “blowing the whistle” on the FBI after 9/11 (see Ramesh Ponnuru for more on that). Now she has apparently taken Ponnuru’s advice and “[left] the bureau entirely in order to become a pundit,” and also a Democrat congressional candidate in Minnesota. Ponnuru predicted that “there would be a place for her in the cable line-up,” and astoundingly enough…
Anyway, here’s Rowley last night on MSNBC:
[Hardball guest host Norah] O’DONNELL: You’re a Democrat running for Congress. It was reported that Republican leaders in your state were just thrilled that you had decided to align yourself with anti-war extremists. Do you think that this could affect your race for Congress?
ROWLEY: Well, I will quickly correct the record, that they are not anti-war extremists. The majority of the people I saw down in Crawford were actually veterans groups. …
O’DONNELL: But, Coleen, they do oppose the war in Iraq, do they not?
ROWLEY: Yes, they do. But that does not make I guess the term extremists. They’re really I think reflective of mainstream America in many ways.
I actually think Rowley is on to something here. In many ways, mainstream America thinks that Bush is a terrorist, America is morally repugnant, and the foreign jihadists coming into Iraq to murder civilians are “freedom fighters.”
Also, when pressed, Rowley wouldn’t say, as Sheehan does, that the U.S. should “bring the troops home now,” but as with many Dems, she couldn’t say what she would do differently in Iraq, other than to mutter something about how the U.S. has to “end the perception of an occupation” by setting a timeline.