"An Honorable Place to Work"

I thought this exchange between Ted Turner and Tom Brokaw on "Meet the Press" Sunday was surreal. Turner is either a master of moral equivalence, or Vladimir Putin has something on him:

MR. BROKAW: You met Vladimir Putin when he was just an aide to the mayor of St. Petersburg. He picked up you and Jane Fonda, to whom you were married at the time. But as you have watched him since then, most people see not in his eyes a soulful person, but the eyes--three letters, as someone has put it: KGB. That he is...

MR. TURNER: Well, he had that background. But you know, we have an FBI and, and, and, and, and we're not prejudice against somebody who's worked at the FBI. It's an honorable place to work. And the KGB, I think, was an honorable place to work. And it, it gave people in the former Soviet Union, a communist country, an opportunity to do something important and worthwhile.

MR. BROKAW: But in the meantime, it appears that he's very much more interested in just causing difficulty for the United States, getting in our face in a manner of speaking.

MR. TURNER: Well, wait. We're the ones--in my opinion, we're the ones that started that. We're the ones that started by putting the Star Wars system in Czechoslovakia and Poland when they wanted to be part of it. We've said that that system is only to protect us from Iran or protect Europe from Iranian missiles. So why didn't we cooperate with the Russians? Why have we constantly been pushing--we've been pushing on the Russians all the time.

MR. BROKAW: Your friend, Jimmy Carter, tried to be friendly with Leonid Brezhnev, and for his friendliness what did Brezhnev do?

MR. TURNER: Hell, I don't remember. It was before I...

MR. BROKAW: He invaded Afghan...

MR. TURNER: ...got involved.

MR. BROKAW: He invaded Afghanistan.

MR. TURNER: Well, we invaded Afghanistan, too, and it's a lot further--at least it's on the border of the Soviet Union or the former Soviet Union or Russia. A lot of these countries have changed names several times.

MR. BROKAW: But, Ted, don't try to go there in terms of justifying that. I mean, it is--the fact is that the Russians--it was a naked...

MR. TURNER: Why can't I try and justify it?

MR. BROKAW: It was naked aggression on the part of the Russians at the time.

MR. TURNER: Well, going into Iraq was naked aggression on the part of the United States.

MR. BROKAW: Yeah, but big power politics and changing big power politics requires everyone to come to the table, and that includes the Russians, not just the United States.

MR. TURNER: They'll come if we invite them, I'm sure.