Juan, Juan, Juan… Do you ever learn your lesson? Well, regardless, I’m glad you don’t because you vs. Brit Hume and the rest of the panel on FNS are always great entertainment. Do you really enjoy getting beat up by Brit and Bill every Sunday? Heck, sometimes even Chris gets in a lick or two! Anyway, thank you for the comic fodder. They have a new one on the panel today, Elisabeth Bumiller from the New York Times. Can you get any more fair and balanced that that? A NYT and an NPR reporter.

This first panel segment is about Iraq.

The talk moved to the current status of the war, and Elisabeth’s thought is that now the “Strategy for Victory” slogan has ‘failed,’ she thinks Bush has to revert to fear-mongering. Here’s a partial transcript, including Juan getting his ass kicked by Brit (again):

Elisabeth: …so he has to now warn about the terrible consequences of withdrawing too soon.

Brit: One again, Chris, we’re down to this question: Whether people believe we are at war… REALLY at war, or engaged, instead, in some kind of a warn in name only – some kind of a war where you… like a war on cancer; a metaphorical war or a real war. In a real war, terrible things happen; the enemy behaves in ways that are unpredictable and often successful. You have terrible setbacks – operations that should take a short time take a long time, and sometimes the other way around. You have great victories; you have important defeats, and it drags on for a while. A lot of people get killed. That’s what happens in a real war, and that’s what’s happened in all real wars. In this particular case, if you don’t believe we’re really at war, then this whole operation in Iraq seems like a misbegotten military adventure, if you do believe…

Juan: But the way that you’re framing it, Brit, is stay the course or you don’t believe we’re at war. Why can’t it be that you believe that we are at war with terrorists, and the way that this war has been conducted so far has been unsatisfactory? In fact, it’s been a failure. And let’s look at some alternative strategies that may include… may include…

Brit: …withdraw the troops?

Juan: …things like saying ‘we have a civil war here; we don’t want American soldiers in the midst of a civil wars. Is it possible that we should allow for this country to be divided differently? Is it possible that we would look at different strategies, involving different forces that have different ends…

Brit: No…

Juan: …so that we define victory in some other way than thinking we’re going to kill all the terrorists, we’re going to force democracy on the Iraqis?

Brit: But Juan, at the end of the day, when you’re fighting an enemy that’s shooting at you, you’re either going to defeat the enemy or let the enemy win. If these al…

Juan: But they’re shooting at each other!

Brit: If these alternatives… If they’re shooting at each other then Americans aren’t in any grave danger then, are they??? And if you think about it in any historic terms, these casualty rates, as regrettable as they are, and they are regrettable, indeed, they’re incredibly low for Americans. So, when you get down to it, all these alternative strategies that you’re talking about amount to one thing: RETREAT.

Juan: But we’ve been fighting these guys longer than we’ve been fighting Nazis.

Stay tuned for Juan’s second lesson from the panel today…. next post.

Watch the video here.