From last night’s Fox News All-Stars.
On the Obama administration’s insistence it has been consistent on the public option:
What’s endearing here is the way that Sebelius has adopted the Obama habit of saying that I have never ever changed or wavered. Remember Obama did that when he said at first he wouldn’t take public monies in campaigns, and then of course he did. He changed his mind on eavesdropping and wiretapping and pretended he didn’t.
He always says, “As I have always said, I never changed.” And of course, if you are omniscient, omnipotent, and unerring, then obviously it [the change in position] is in the eye of the beholder who is not able to read Obama’s scripture correctly.
He clearly has shifted radically. You can’t say, on the one hand, it [the public option] must be in the bill I sign, and then say it is only a sliver — and pretend you aren’t inconsistent.
What happened is they understand that with the public — the public anger is so high they will pass nothing, and that is why [the public option] is abandoned. All of this [denial] is a way to placate the left, which understands it is a kabuki dance. It’s a way of pretending that it’s still on the table. It’s off. It’s gone. It’s dead. It is a dead parrot.
On Robert Novak:
What made him so influential and really unique was his independence. He was a reporter, but what he did by writing his reportage in a column was he severed any control any editor or managing editor would have had over the content or placement of his material. Nobody edited him. It was his column. So he was out there as a reporter on his own.
And there was a second kind of independence he had, which was he was a consummated insider. And he succeeded the great early 20th-century columnists like Walter Lippman who were also insiders but who were actually part of administrations. Lippman worked with Woodrow Wilson.
He [Novak] was an insider who knew everybody, but he was never a member of a team. So he was always independent politically and also editorially. That’s why he was important, and that’s why he was respected, and that’s why he will be missed.