Damn. That was the one non-Fox show where I could control the message.

i say good riddance.
he was the best example of the worst of journalism today.
we should not forget his role in helping get this war started.
after all, cheney went on his show because he knew that he would be able to "control" the message.
he was a fraud and a hypocrite and the world will be better off with him gone.
the only people who will miss him will be the republican politicians who knew they could go on his show and lie with impunity.
Posted by frankie d | June 13, 2008 4:22 PM

So now people feel the need to say what a great guy he was? Now I hope we can get someone that will ask real questions and not just gotcha's.
Posted by rob | June 13, 2008 4:24 PM...

so all of a sudden we are supposed to forget about all of the outrageously harmful things people like russert do?
if he had practiced his craft of journalism, there is a very good chance that we would have never gotten involved in such a harmful war.
if people like condi rice and cheney did not feel that they could go on his show and lie through their teeth about matters of life and death, it is very possible that they would have never felt comfortable lying, continually to the american people.
if he had actually been the "tough questioner" he supposedly was, perhaps he would have actually torn cheney's smug assurances about the coming war to shreds and the administration would not have taken us to war and wasted thousands of american lives and hundreds of thousands of iraqi lives.
he'll have to deal with his complicity in his own terms, but i have no qualms about pointing out a bunch of inconvenient truths.
if pointing this out makes me a dick and less than a class act, i wear that proudly.
Posted by frankie d | June 13, 2008 4:40 PM

Good to know I'm not the only one Sam. Seemed like a decent enough guy. This really is going to ruin my R. Kelly, "not guilty" party tonight.
Posted by laborlibert | June 13, 2008 4:40 PM...

Might the D in Frankie D stand for dipshit? You sound like AJ on the last season of the Sopranos.
Posted by laborlibert | June 13, 2008 4:51 PM

... Russert loved life you say? What a sick thing to say when you have read the kind of qualms that have been raised about Russert's moral shortcomings on this thread.
What about those million dead Iraqis? I bet they loved their lives too until they were ended by unsought and unjustified violence -- as opposed to gluttony.
Posted by The Fool | June 13, 2008 6:34 PM

So Meet the Press thrives, delighting precisely the sort of person who doesn't realize that a hardball is a kind of ball whereas a curveball is a kind of pitch.

Actually, the balls Russert favors may be hard, but the pitches he throws aren't curveballs, which go someplace useful. They're sillyballs, which go somewhere pointless. Russert has created a strike zone of his own where toughness meets irrelevance....

Russert's goal isn't to inform his audience. He's there to "make news"—to get his guest to say something embarrassing that lands in the next day's papers or on the NBC Nightly News. The politicians, in turn, go on the show determined not to make news. And why do they bother? Because... it's a rite of passage, and any politician too chicken to play Russert's inane games would never garner the respect of the political class.