REID AND THE BRASS, PART 2….Did Harry Reid call Gen. Peter Pace, the outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “incompetent” in a conference call with liberal bloggers on Tuesday? Oddly, Reid has declined to comment on this one way or the other even though the call was on the record. So what really happened?
Apparently there were seven bloggers on the call, and six of the seven say they don’t remember hearing Reid say that. However, the seventh, Bob Geiger, provides this direct quote from the call:
REID: I guess the president, uh, he’s gotten rid of Pace because he could not get him confirmed here in the Senate… Pace is also a yes-man for the president and I told him to his face, I laid it out to him last time he came to see me, I told him what an incompetent man I thought he was.
So what did Reid mean? Hard to say, precisely, but the Associated Press says that although Reid wouldn’t confirm calling Pace incompetent, “he essentially said as much when he told reporters that Pace ‘had not done a very good job in speaking out for some obvious things that weren’t going right in Iraq.’”
OK then.
UPDATE: Greg Sargent has a more extended version of the quote here. The antecedents of “he” and “him” are not 100% clear, but the most obvious interpretation is that Reid does indeed think Pace is incompetent.
