The beauty of the internet and the threat to the main street media is that by opening up source material to the public, it provides the public with a way to analyze the analysis. I love the way White House Press Secretary answers press questions about the role of diplomacy in the current Israeli operation to destroy a long standing terrorist enclave.
White House Press Briefing: Just one final one on this. Why shouldn't the President be the one to mount an aggressive diplomacy, pick up the phone, call Assad of Syria and say, put an end to this, and start negotiating directly with the Syrians?
MR. SNOW: Because the track record stinks. I don't know if you remember all the old pictures of diplomats in the Reagan years going -- in the Carter, Reagan, and maybe even the early Bush years, the first Bush administration -- who knows, Clinton may have done it, too -- sitting around there drinking tea with Hafez al-Assad, the father, having to sit there for five, six, ten hours, listening to polite but long discourses on greater Syria, and at the end of that, having gotten nothing. There is absolutely no reason to assume, based on the track record, that negotiations and conversations with the Syrians would yield any fruit.
Q Wait a minute. You said yourself, correctly, that both Bush 41 and Clinton had talks with Hafez al-Assad --
MR. SNOW: Which were blazingly pointless. ...
Q But it's a --
MR. SNOW: I mean, it may sound good that you dispatch somebody who then can be dealt with in bad faith by a government that does not intend to deliver.
