On Sunday Coleman was discussing General Petraeus's testimony before Congress last week. She had a guest - just one - to provide the meat of the discussion. I missed the first couple of minutes of her interview with her guest Ray McGovern (a name I didn't know). I don't know how she introduced him, but within a couple of minutes I knew we were not going to get anything like a balanced report on what Petraeus had to say or how it was received.
What we got instead was that Petraeus lied to Congress and is willing to sacrifice the lives of his men in pursuit of his Presidential ambitions. That's pretty strong stuff and it occurred to me that it might even be libelous under Irish law (much stricter than US law). Coleman never even tried to say, "Oh come on. That's a pretty strong accusation. You don't really believe that, do you?"
Instead, she let him go on in that vein for the rest of the interview. Only he and his colleagues at Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (can't find a web site) really know what's going on. He even damned Petraeus by claiming his 1974 marriage was merely a way of promoting himself to a military superior.
She didn't even react when McGovern referred to President Bush as the "self-proclaimed Commander in Chief". Hardly "self-proclaimed" seeing as the Constitution says:
The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States …Even that bit of nonsense went unchallenged.
This is how I remember Coleman's shows. Well researched, well produced, but far too often completely lacking in any semblance of balance.
