What makes House Speaker Dennis Hastert such a special politician?
The New York Times carries a story that may help answer that question.
Hastert met with 9/11 Commission Chair Thomas Keane and Vice Chair Lee Hamilton about the forthcoming report of the 9/11 Commission. What did they talk about? Not much, according to Hastert:
Mr. Hastert said that during the briefing on Tuesday the commission's chairman, Thomas H. Kean, a former Republican governor of New Jersey, and its vice chairman, Lee H. Hamilton, a former Democratic member of the House, did not offer a detailed summary of the report or its conclusions. "The report's not printed yet," Mr. Hastert said. "We didn't go into detail on content."
"One of the things I've said all along is I would hope that this wouldn't become a political football," he said. "I think we ought to take the information in this report and move forward - and how best to reorganize intelligence, if we need to do that."
Hastert had to add one comment about a report that he hasn’t read after a meeting in which the report's contents were not discussed so as to make sure the report did not become a political football:
After their briefing, Speaker J. Dennis Hastert and other House Republican leaders held a news conference at which they suggested that the report, which is scheduled to be made public on Thursday, would show that intelligence and law enforcement failures before the Sept. 11 attacks were more the responsibility of the Clinton administration than of the Bush administration."The report covers eight years of the Clinton administration and eight months of the Bush administration," Mr. Hastert said...