Free Republic

Tim Russert was an American. I'm not using the term in its patriotic sense, although he certainly was not just a patriot but an unabashed one at that. No, Tim Russert was an American in that very particular fashion that makes Americans the most distinctive breed of humans on the planet. He was an American in precisely the cultural sense that causes European elites -- and all too frequently our own -- to grind their teeth and look down their noses with such haughty disdain at the one population on earth composed of the entire world's rejects, refugees and descendants...

WHEN the NBC News host Tim Russert died on June 13, NBC tried to hold back the news from going public for more than an hour to notify his family vacationing in Italy and presumably to prepare for what became six hours of coverage on its cable news outlet, MSNBC. And King Canute, ancient legend has it, tried to hold back the tide. Mr. Russert collapsed from a heart attack in NBC’s Washington newsroom around 1:40 p.m.; he was treated there and then taken to a hospital, arriving at 2:23 and being pronounced dead shortly thereafter, according to press accounts....

Keith Olbermann is threatening to leave MSNBC if he doesn’t land the late Tim Russert’s “Meet the Press” job on NBC, according to a source. But he’s not the only MSNBC cable news anchor jockeying for Russert’s job — Chris Matthews is also said to have his eye on the plum position. Matthews was heard discussing what seemed to be his strategy for landing Russert’s job when he attended Wednesday’s memorial for Russert in Washington, D.C., the New York Post’s Page Six column reported, saying Matthews “huddled with an unidentified ‘agent type’ and seemed to be plotting.” An observer told...

Tim Russert has been dead a week but that hasn't stopped the nakedly ambitous potato heads at MSNBC from lusting after his Meet The Press job. Word is out and reported by Page Six at the New York Post that both hysterically hyper Chris Matthews and that bumbling bufoon Keith Olbermann are both jockeying for position in the MTP sweepstakes: TIM Russert's body wasn't even cold in the ground before MSNBC anchors Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann started jockeying for his job, sources claim. .....

TIM Russert's body wasn't even cold in the ground before MSNBC anchors Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann started jockeying for his job, sources claim. Matthews was heard loudly discussing what seemed to be his strategy for landing Russert's "Meet the Press" show at Wednesday's memorial reception for the NBC Washington bureau chief at the Kennedy Center in DC. After Brian Williams, Carl Bernstein, David Gergen, Barbara Walters and NBC brass eulogized their friend, Matthews huddled with an unidentified "agent type" and seemed to be plotting... Meanwhile, Matthews' MSNBC cable cohort Olbermann, who was also at the memorial, is "threatening to...

MSNBC/NBC News announce that Brian Williams will take over Meet The Press on a trial run starting this Sunday.

NBC anchor Brian Williams will be the first to fill in for Tim Russert as the host for "Meet the Press" this Sunday, the network said today. Russert died suddenly last week of cardiac arrest. After Williams, several different NBC news personalities are expected to rotate as the host of the Sunday morning interview show until a permanent replacement is named - sometime later this year or early next.

The shocking death of Tim Russert last Friday has left an entire nation wondering what happened.  He was a model patient, doing everything his doctors asked.  All major media have run articles trying to explain the nuances and difficulties in treating coronary artery disease.  These articles find little fault in Russert’s care, trying to create the idea that his heart attack was just too hard to predict and that all that could have been done for him was done.  I beg to differ.  His death represents the failure of standard medical care to produce a positive result – an occurrence...

One of the names being mentioned as a replacement for Tim Russert on "Meet the Press" is Chris Matthews. Matthews is one of the biggest horse's patooties on television, if not the biggest, a man so enamored of of his own grating voice that he can barely stop talking long enough to let a guest get a word in. Much like Charley Rose, only worse, Matthews is master of the run-on question. He goes on and on, and just when the guest detects that Matthews is about to take a breath and tries to jump in with an answer, Matthews...

RUSH: Tim Russert passed away before the program ended, but the news on Friday didn't happen until afterwards.  I actually got the news at about a quarter of three Friday afternoon in an e-mail that said "Not For Reporting" because it hadn't been confirmed.  A very, very, very sad thing.  I knew Tim Russert, and he was just a prince of a guy. But I have to tell you, folks, this orgy of coverage from about four o'clock Friday afternoon on ceased to be about Tim Russert and instead it's been about the media and who they are and how...

Tim Russert / Archbishop George Niederauer Washington DC, Jun 18, 2008 / 04:11 am (CNA).- Archbishop George H. Niederauer of San Francisco, chairman of the U.S. bishops' Communications Committee, the late Tim Russert on Tuesday for his devotion to his Catholic faith, family, work as a journalist and his work with Catholic charities."Russert was valued by Americans for his tremendous command of the political and electoral process and his commitment to discovering each aspect of the story that contributed to people having a better awareness of the issues of public life and candidates for political office," Archbishop Niederauer said....

Given the great strides that have been made in preventing and treating heart disease, what explains Tim Russert’s sudden death last week at 58 from a heart attack? The answer, at least in part, is that although doctors knew that Mr. Russert, the longtime moderator of “Meet the Press” on NBC, had coronary artery disease and were treating him for it, they did not realize how severe the disease was because he did not have chest pain or other telltale symptoms that would have justified the kind of invasive tests needed to make a definitive diagnosis. In that sense, his...

President Bush held a meeting this morning in the Roosevelt Room on the Midwest flooding Transcript President Bush meet this morning in the Oval Office with General Dan McNeill, Former Commander of the International Security Assistance Force Transcript President Bush honored Black Music Month in the East Room Transcript President Bush and First Lady Laura attended a wake for journalist Tim Russert at St. Albans School in Washington, DC Enoy your visit to Sanity Island

Russert's funeral arrangement has been made and is as follows: On Tuesday, June 17, 2008, a wake will be held at St Albans School in Washington, DC. It will be open to the public. According to the Washington Post, the public wake will be held from 2 to 9 p.m. eastern time in the Cafritz Refectory of the Albans School, which is between Wisconsin and Massachusetts avenues. Other private vigils are being held in the Washington and in Buffalo New York areas, where Russert grew up. His funeral, which is closed to the public, will be held on Wednesday June...

Only with Tim Russert's sudden death at the age of 58 has his true stature as a landmark journalist become as widely recognized as it has long deserved to be. To ask who will replace him as host of "Meet the Press" is to confront the reality that there is no one comparable on the horizon. Those of us who have followed "Meet the Press" since the long ago days of Lawrence Spivak know that Russert was the best of some very good hosts. What made Tim Russert special was not some trademark catchword or contrived persona. What you saw...

Still reeling from Tim Russert's death, NBC News must now contemplate replacing the man who not only dominated the Sunday morning talk shows, but served as chief political commentator and ran the Washington bureau. The "Meet the Press" host had what was arguably the most important and far-reaching job in television news, particularly in an election year. He died of a heart attack Friday while preparing for another week's edition of "Meet the Press." NBC wasn't talking about potential successors while planning Russert's wake on Tuesday and memorial service Wednesday that will be televised on MSNBC from the Kennedy Center....

Here's one thing you can say about journalists: Surely no one loves us as much as we love ourselves. That's one lesson of the Tim Russert coverage. A friend told me Sunday: "I now know more about Tim Russert than I do many members of my family." After Russert's shocking death Friday at age 58, television kept serving up witnesses to his expertise, intelligence, diligence, kindness, faith, love of family, Buffalo and the Buffalo Bills. The self-indulgence was breathtaking. On Monday's "Today," Matt Lauer interviewed Russert's son, Luke. The show basically gave over the first half-hour to the Russert story....

there was another chapter in Mr. Russert’s career that is less known, and that offers another insight into his personality. And it is one which he arguably thrived at nearly as much as he did sitting behind his desk at NBC News: as a political strategist and operative in one of the most brutal political environments in the country. Mr. Russert worked in the early 1980s as a counselor to Mario M. Cuomo, the Queens Democrat who had just been elected governor of New York; I was covering the new administration for The Daily News. Albany was a political roughhouse,...

The Talk Shows Sunday, June 15th, 2008 Guests to be interviewed today on major television talk shows: FOX NEWS SUNDAY (Fox Network): Sens. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., and Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas; American Petroleum Institute President and CEO Red Cavaney; Earth Day Network President Kathleen Rogers. MEET THE PRESS (NBC): Tribute to late host Tim Russert.FACE THE NATION (CBS): Gov. Bobby Jindal, R-La.; former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.THIS WEEK (ABC): Former Sens. Fred Thompson, R-Tenn., and John Edwards, D-N.C.LATE EDITION (CNN) : Reps. John Boehner, R-Ohio, and Chris Van Hollen, D-Md.; Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa.; Gov. Janet Napolitano, D-Ariz.; Douglas Holtz-Eakin,...

Among all the tributes offered Friday night on the various cable networks to Tim Russert, only one that I saw managed to use the opportunity to crassly advance a political perspective and advance a personal political ambition. Chris Matthews is salivating at the chance to run for US Senator in 2010 against Arlen Spector in Pennsylvania. He has made no secret of this. Friday night, MSNBC caught up with Matthews in Paris, where he was vacationing. Asked about his memories of Russert, Matthews had only one story to tell -- about how on the eve of the Iraq war, he...