Tim Russert is unhappy about what happened to Don Imus.

Not that this was expressed in so many precise words, but then when are the Beltway 500 ever able to excavate those buried relics of their own assumptions? Take it from me, Timmeh considers Don Imus at worst, a wronged man, and at best, a tragic one. Speaking for myself, I consider this attitude the real tragedy.

But first, General Zinni, he who spoke out against the Iraq invasion even before it turned sour, mere minutes after the fall of Saddam's statute. Props go to Tony Zinni because he warned this administration and the American people, in real time, before it was too late, that invading Iraq would prove to be sheer folly.

Now he's got an up-dated paperback version of his book, The Battle for Peace, coming out, the perfect time to express his concerns about where we go from here. .

Not out of Iraq, according to Zinni, not anytime soon.

Tony Zinni is a man of strong and generally intelligent opinions, but he dislikes politics, especially electoral ones, opining that our Presidents should have single six year terms to avoid their energies being suctioned into re-election efforts, and this desire not to be seen as partisan, but without watering down the pointedness of his own point of view allowed Russert to paint Zinni into a non-partisan corner.

Russert set the stage by serving up manwich-sized helpings of Bush-wacking - like tape of Cheney's statement in 2002 that Saddam's amassing of WMD was now beyond question, which happened to take place at a dinner in honor of Zinni, or reading an unstinting critique of the multiple failures of this administration in Iraq from Zinni’s own book:

“We promised to build a new Iraqi state in all” aspects “and the Iraqi people are still waiting for us to deliver on our promise.

“Why?

“We now know the answers to that question: Poor intelligence, lack of planning, faulty political motivation, incompetent or inexperienced people placed in key positions, flawed assumptions, lack of understanding of the Iraqi culture, arrogance, spin, and the list goes on and on.”

As Timmeh noted, “that’s quite a list.”

Moving forward, immediately, Timmeh asked Zinni’s response to the notion of a War Czar, but not before reading the comments of Jack Sheehan, one of the Generals who turned down the position because "they," the Bush administration, doesn't know where it's going in Iraq, and because, in calling around, Sheehan confirmed that the residue of the Cheney view that we're going to win a victory in Iraq still predominates in the administration, while what pragmatists there are express desperation about how the hell we're going to get out of Dodge and survive.

Zinni likes Sheehan and agrees with him about Bush administration’s cluelessness - the answer is that we have to reconsider our entire strategy towards the Middle East. Gee, where have I heard that before? Oh, uh, The Iraq Study Group, maybe?

Not somewhere Russert wished to go, Instead, we got the pivot, perfectly executed. Yes, Bush has much to answer for, but what about those Democrats, who, according to Russert, only stand for various versions of withdrawal, setting date certains, etc. Are they right, he asks Zinni, setting up the General’s perfect plain old-fashioned "No."

So what is Zinni proposing we ought to do about this whole mess.

Just about everything that Democrats have been talking about, everything the Iraq Study Group discussed, everything that Bush won't hear of. But please, please remember that Zinni said "no, the Democrats don't have the answer.

To be fair, Zinni caught the ball willingly and ran with it. Both Bush and Democrats are talking tactics, not strategy, he asserted. The surge is a tactic, not a strategy. As a tactic, it could have been implemented as a way to cover our military on their way out. And to be fair to Zinni, most of what he had to say made sense, and is probably what many of us would like to see happen. The problem was the pretense, set up by Russert, and willingly employed by Zinni, that Democrats' insistence that this war be brought to an end is the same thing as disengaging from the entire Middle East. No, no one is talking about that. The real issues are all about how we engage, with whom, on what conditions, and why.

Zinni doesn't really disagree with most Democratic positions; in fact, I suspect that he is more open than most Democratic presidential candidates feel that they can be to the idea that central to reconfiguring our Middle East strategy is for America to become, once again, a semi-honest broker between Israel and the Palestinians. I suspect Zinni would have no difficulty serving in some capacity in the administration of any of the Democratic presidential candidates. In fact, his list of to-dos was almost exactly what John Kerry was proposing in 2004, including seeking partners in the region, revitalizing international organizations and using them, expanding our notion of what constitutes a security strategy, like, for instance, jobs for Iraqis, and reconstruction for Iraq. Duh.

Yes, but General, how to we do that while the security situation is so terrible? How do we make sure, this time, that our billions don't go AWOL, as so much of our hard-earned tax money did last time around?

Come to think of it, couldn't we say that John Kerry and John Edwards were right when they first voted yes on that 20 billion slated for Iraqi reconstruction, and then voted against it, when the final bill didn't include sufficient oversight of how the money got spent. Zinni kept saying we‘re not going to get out, but what was he really suggesting that‘s different from what Democrats and war critics have been saying?

First of all, I think that any attempt to fix Iraq, if you will, to commit to a larger involvement or intervention probably went away when we didn’t adopt the, the Baker-Hamilton recommendations. I thought that would be a start. Certainly didn’t go far enough. I think, now, the American people are becoming disillusioned. I think it’s, it’s clear, though, that we cannot leave the region, we shouldn’t naively think we’re pulling out, that this is Somalia or Vietnam. And I think the debate should be, amongst the candidates is, is how do we redesign the strategy for this region, protect our interests, create the kind of coalition involvement that would help support this and share the burden. We need that kind of imagination out there. And it isn’t just about Iraq. It’s about how we engage or what do we do about Iran and Syria, our involvement in the Middle East peace process, the rebuilding of relationships with former allies that has been stressed and strained, and, and how we deal with, a cooperative way, to counter the extremism that’s on the rise.

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We’re going to be in this part of the world. We aren’t going to leave. Now, we can readjust our strategy for Iraq. We can extricate our troops from the sectarian violence. But we’re going to have to contain the problems that could spill over and the—and cause this critical part of the world to spin out of control. We need to rethink that kind of strategy, that kind of positioning. But more importantly, we need to rethink our relationships in that region.

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Most of the leaders in this region that I talk to are asking me, “What’s the new arrangement?” They are at least thinking past Iraq. They’re thinking in strategic terms, and no one’s engaging them on that level of, of discussion. There should be more in the way of burden sharing, more in the way of cooperative defense, more in the way of security assistance programs that help build the kind of region that can take care of itself with our help and with our involvement. There’s no way out of that.

How long might we wait for one of the beltway 500 to notice those similarities? Not until the last Arctic glacier melts? Yeah, and then some, methinks. And did Russert think to bring up Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Syria? Of course not. Timmeh can’t even tell that Zinni is saying exactly what the Iraq Study Group did.

Oh, and General Zinni confirmed that yes, we are breaking our military over the anvil of Iraq.

The rest of the program was devoted to the demise, for now, of Don Imus. Timmeh led a discussion that was supposed to include, as well, two other topics, but Russert, John Harwood of the WSJ, David Brooks, Gwen Ifell, and Eugene Robinson couldn't tear themselves away from their once-a-decade discussion of race in America.

The discussion started with a paradisiacal exchange: White man, Russert, reads a quote from a column by black man, Eugene Robinson, in which Robinson insists that the Imus controversy is not about “who can say what,“ and then waves in Robinson’s face this weeks Time magazine cover, which poses exactly that question as the central one. No, Robinson reiterated, the issue was a kind of offensive speech that hit deep and provoked a response that ultimately couldn’t be ignored by those who present and sponsor Imus; it showed that black folks weren’t ready to keep on taking it, and that enough of them were finally in positions within the media and within sponsoring corporations to make a difference.

David Brooks half-heartedly accepted there was racial dimension to Imus’s comments, but was more comfortable chalking it up to a culture of cruelty which admittedly is demeaning American discourse and American popular culture.

As you’ve probably heard, Gwen Ifill challenged the fact that Brooks had been a guest on Imas, and didn’t, like so many others, offer any comment until the issue was resolved by the cancellation by MSNBC and CBS of Imas’s morning show. It was nice to see her so relentless, although it was also saddening when paired with how completely she comports herself on her PBS gig, “Washington Week in Review” as a typical beltway insider.

John Hardwood felt justice had been done. It was left to Russert to question the justice of what had happened during the previous week, and clearly, Timmeh felt a personal stake in it all, not only as a regular guest on Imus In The Morning, but as someone who, as he said, likes Imus, and doesn’t think for a moment that he’s a racist, though, yes, what he said was racist.

For me, the entirely clueless aspect of the discussion was contained in a phrase we heard often during the week, which Russert repeated, that Imus is an equal opportunity offender. Isn’t that cute? You take one of the basic concepts of the civil rights movement, equal opportunity, an aim that was partly achieved through one of the most controversial of remedies employed to change the negative outcomes for African-Americans often made inevitable by a racist past, and present, in order to deny that Imus discussing a group of highly achieving, young, female, African-American student athletes in a casually demeaning conversation with his so-called producer, whom he once admitted he’d hired explicitly to make N-word jokes, using classic tropes of American racism isn’t an example of racism in action, but nothing more than a shock and awe technique used to make fun of everyone.

No one mentioned the discussion about race, poverty and on-going segregation that we were supposed to have after Katrina. No one mentioned the loud yawn that Bill Clinton’s attempt to have a national dialogue on race elicited from the SCLM. No one mentioned the issue of voter suppression, which is at the heart of the on-going question of the politicization of the Justice Department, and you can be sure that no one mentioned the 2000 election in which thousands of black voters in Florida were kept from voting because they were incorrectly identified as felons. No one mentioned that various kind of affirmative action programs are what has made it possible for diversity to enter more workplaces than ever before, which is what caught out Imus. And of course no one mentioned the relentless attack on all forms of affirmative action by the Republican Party, starting under Reagan, and reaching some kind of apex in the Bush, father and son, appointments to the Federal Judiciary. No one mentioned the over-representation of African-American males in our prison system, despite the fact that statistical analysis shows that those difference can’t only be caused by a greater frequency of law-breaking among African-Americans.

What did get mentioned was rap music, and Twana Brawley and Jesse Jackson’s Hymie town remark. Eugene Robinson pointed out that both Sharpton and Jackson had been selected by white media to be the major spokespersons for African-Americans, an interesting point that was ignored by everyone but Gwen Ifill. Russert told a story of having a conversation during the week with an African-American colleague who, though a regular listener to Imus, felt he had to go, although this person had thought it hilarious when Bernie McGirk put a funny hat on to make fun of some Catholic Cardinal, the point of the story seeming to be that were are all of us equal opportunity insensitive bigots. That there might be a significant difference between making fun of a public institution like the Catholic church, and deliberately demeaning a specific group of young women by treating them like racist stereotypes didn’t seem to occur to Timmeh.

Part of the problem in our current discussion of race in this country is that so often the terms are dictated by the question is this or that person really a racist. Russert clearly felt that Imus isn’t, not in his heart of hearts.

But is that really the central question we should be asking? Who cares what is in his heart of hearts. I’m ready to stipulate that there are no more racists anywhere in America, because no one wants to be known as one, not even David Duke. But that doesn’t mean racism doesn’t still exist here, and been given renewed energy and life by a backlash that embraced by one of our major political parties, and the rightwing movement that has taken it over.

For his final question to the group, Russert pulled out a real corker that seemed to epitomize the inability of mainstream journalists to acknowledge that very specific forms of racism still exist and still stunt lives: what would be the response, Russert posed to his guests, if “Don, Don Imus takes time off and comes back and says, you know, “I was an addict, and I embraced that and tried to educate people about that and educate people about Autism. I’m now going to dedicate my life to racial reconciliation and healing, and I’m going to talk about that on my new program”?

Yes, that’s just what we need, racial reconciliation, racial healing, led by Don Imus. Instead, how about a discussion of justice and fairness for all, about understanding our racist past, how about a discussion about the continuing segregation of our schools, and about why the white media continues to pretend that Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson are the only African-American voices that are going to be heard on national media. Couldn’t be that they are the two black voices in America that whites take the most pleasure in disliking, now could it?