To: Tim Russert
About: Meet the Press

By Steve Warren

Last Sunday on your "Meet The Press," you allowed Tom Davis R-VA, the head of the National Republican Congressional Committee to lie through his teeth without so much as a hint of rebuttal, correction or factual follow up. He and you were discussing the now discredited, hair-brained plan to put Social Security funds into the hands of the money managers on Wall Street. He said privatizing Social Security was "...not the Republican position." Lie. It was specifically worded in the 2000 Republican Party Platform.

He said, "President Clinton embraced it at one point as you recall." Lie. You know the truth about this.

He said "205 Democrats voted to praise it (privatizing)..." Lie. You know it.

He specifically MIS-QUOTED several Democrats as supporting privatization. If you don't have the factual statements from those Democrats, I'll be happy to refer you to the public documents Mr. Davis was lying about.

Sir, you are most certainly an informed individual. Indeed your position requires you to be one of the top 1% of "most informed" individuals in Washington, so by allowing blatant lies to pass you are participating in the lie.

This coming Sunday morning, your neighbor Dick Cheney is due to come out of hiding and sit down with you again.This is a man who lead his company to cook the books and rip off investors. This is a man who lead Halliburton in numerous scam transactions to violate US trade sanctions and do illegal deals with Iraq through the 1990's. This is the man who last month refused to accept a complaint in a suit filed against him regarding his actions at his former company and ordered his guards to threaten the process server with arrest. As you well know, interfering with a process server is obstruction of justice and a violation of federal law.Under CEO Dick Cheney, Halliburton paid an undisclosed fine for defrauding the US Military by submitting false claims for products it did not deliver between 1994 and 1997.

His company was also fined for dealing with Libyain violation of US law.In early 2001, Dick Cheney met with Ken Lay in the vice president's office.The next day Junior announced the government would not be putting price controls on skyrocketing energy prices in California, which allowed Enron to continue gouging, cheating and defrauding millions of citizens. Has there ever been a more obvious smoking gun of collusion in fraud?

Are you going to kiss his ass again, sir, as you did in his last appearance on your "show"? Or are you going to be of service to America and a credit to the higher ideals of your profession? I am almost afraid to watch.

I may have to throw a baseball through my television.

Steve Warren