Media focus on the Petraeus/Crocker Hearings

It has been an exciting last two days here in Washington, D.C. Political junkies and other Hill people welcomed home two highly anticipated witnesses to sit in the hot seat yesterday and today. Gen. David Petraeus and Amb. Ryan Crocker returned from from Iraq to discuss the progress (and lack thereof) in Iraq pursuant to Congressional acts passed earlier this year, before authorizing more money for the occupation.

I'll let the news outlets handle most of the analysis, but I had a few comments:

First, I was disappointed by the video coverage on TV and the online news outlets by giving Sen. Obama video space in their coverage over other more salient and informed senators that talked today. The Washington Post for instance in its online article has prominent video links to Sen. Lugar (R-Ind.) and Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.). While there are insightful questions and comments from these two videos, there was a high degree of anticipation of the Senators from Virginia -- Jim Webb(D-Va.) and John Warner (R-Va.), both former Secretaries of the Dept. of Navy and with extensive experience on wartime strategy. The articles and the coverage for them were minimal, considering The Washington Post also claims that it covers local news as well; the piece would have been just as complete to throw in the discussion by these two senators.


Second, I realize that there is a lot of posturng during these hearings. Congresspeople don't actually have to ask questions in a fashion to try to elicit actual answers. Instead they are doing what lawyers do in a courtroom. Good lawyers in theory anyhow. The old adage is that a lawyer should never ask a question that he or she doesn't already know the answer to. So, politicians like their old lawyer-selves resorted to having commentary and asking damaging or helpful questions. This is not a big new insight for the political junkies that watch C-Span all day, but I thought I'd belabor it for those that get disgusted by the overtness of the posturing and not realize that it is really just the way it is done on the Hill.

Last point I want to make is that the complete transcripts are the best source to see what happened during the hearings. The talking heads and all give good summaries and may give an "In Touch" kind of quality to what happened, but the original sources are always the best. Politico.com has done a good job with keeping all the transcripts, slides and openings remarks on this page: Full text: Petraeus and Crocker testimony.