the president said, well, you promised three options today and you re essentially giving me one and the military said, well, yes, sir. obama went at gates and said, look where s the option. well, he s the commander in chief and is general petraeus promised three options today and you are essentially giving me one in the military. said, well, yes, sir. obama went at gates and said, look, where s the option? this is unacceptable. an electric moment in the situation room, in the white house. and secretary gates said, yes, we owe you that option and it never came and the president had to devise his own. you know, bob, you re familiar with the military. you served in the military and you ve covered all of these years through all of your books about presidents and the military. is this one of the cases where the military is putting the president in a position where eventually they ll get him to do what they want. by the way they sort of euchre him into a strategy plan. no. it s not tha
inflation, health care cost had doubled. so there was a lot of anxiety out there. and i think, in anxious times, people get on more of a hairtrigger. they re afraid that they are not doing the right by their families. they re afraid their own dreams are going to be thwarted. and the silence on kind of politics, you know, that one extreme or the other it seems to have more weight. you re quoting yates to me the other day on the plane. and the center. and both you and tony blair the prime minister that i spoke to recently about you in fact and he s very supportive of what you did and it s very similar. today in this environment is it possible to find that third way again? to bring a center left constituency together when everybody wants to maybe get on the air on msnbc and take a far left position. get on fox and take a murdoch position all the way right. i don t see the republican party fighting that center right. is there a democratic center right?
so it s not impeachable? you know so you re changing your mind now. it s not what you call, impeachable. no, you use terms like this. chris, chris i don t think made up these charges against you, when you go after issues like go ahead. chris, i appreciate your comment. but let s understand that i was quote what dick morris said. i was in no way, shape, or form talking about it. i m not going to be cheering that committee or anything else. the fact is, i m on the committee of waste, fraud and oversight and reform. it s really about going after far down below the president, below his key cabinet officers and get into the parts of government that waste your dollars. that s what my committee has to do. that s our mandate. that s what i intend to do if i m given the opportunity. okay. here s something else. this was posted this year by your staff. let s listen to it on health care. the concern is that if you can bribe and i mean bribe members of the house and the senat
rendell, anyone you are mentioning here, i don t know, asking them about a possible deal involving a job offer. are you going to spend your time doing that? as i said, when governor rendell said this is typical, it goes on. i ve done something similar. a member of the bush administration s press team said that similar things happened under the bush administration. what we discovered was that laws that are on the books to prevent this, routinely are not considered to apply. so as part of reform, it s not a matter of looking back. let s assume for a moment, as i believe, that every administration has done it, we will look into whether or not taxpayer dollars should be used in that way, and try to prevent it in the future, which i think are the event into laws are. but we ve got a lot bigger problems. you know we have $1.4 trillion of borrowed money to get through each year. we re going to are to find savings, waste and so on and that s going to be the main agenda of our committee.
it seems in all that i ve read from the book he wanted to get out on a timetable. he didn t want to be stuck in a long-term war or find himself at the end of one or two terms with a bigger war than he started with, but did he honestly accept the fact that there would be constraints to that kind of policy? there were certain dangers to that, things we couldn t control if we re going to leave on a relatively rapid timetable? well, he wants out. and the theme music in the background here is vietnam. even though he told me and reminded me that he was so young, vietnam didn t have an impact on him as a young boy, vietnam is there. and joe biden, the vice president, is all over the president, just pushing and pounding and hammering in a wonderful bidenesque way. saying, we re locked into vietnam unless we draw up these this term sheet until the military you don t have unlimited time.