Reid On Pace: Truer Words...

Rick Perlstein

June 15, 2007

There's been a violent tempest in the D.C. teapot these last couple of days over a story in The Politico claiming Harry Reid called Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman General Peter Pace "incompetent" to a bunch of bloggers. That's supposed to be a terrible, terrible sin, as if we had a government governed by deference to the military, instead of the other way around. But at any rate, there's been much furrow-browed disquisition over whether Reid said such a thing in the first place.

I think the excellent Greg Sargent of the TPM empire is wrong here. He says this transcript suggests that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid did indeed call the general "incompetent," if in passing, and in a context utterly garbled by The Politico:

Well, I guess the President, he's gotten rid of Pace because he could not get confirmed here in the Senate. Pace is also a yes-man for the President. I told him to his face, I laid it out last time he came in to see me. I told him what an incompetent man I thought he was. But he got rid of his Joint Chiefs of Staff chair, but he still hangs on to this failed Attorney General. And I guess he's gonna [inaudible]. We're gonna keep focusing on it. Every day that goes by, it seems he keeps giving. Now we've learned that the immigration judges are all graduates of Regent University I guess.

But note the antecedent that opens the statement: "the President." I suspect he, not Peter Pace, is the person being spoken to "to his face." I could be wrong; do presidents "come in to see" senators? But in every other "he" or "him" the reference is ambiguously to Bush.

Harry Reid's a tough guy—a boxer, a man who beat up someone who tried to bribe him. If he did tell the president to his face that he was incompetent, wouldn't that be...cool?