Reporters savage White House Rep, about damn time.

[frigidmagi]

Use your Anger!

[quote]NEW YORK At numerous press briefings last week, not a single reporter asked White House Press Secretary about emerging allegations that top presidential aide Karl Rove was a source, or the source, for Time magazine's Matthew Cooper in the Valerie Plame case. On Sunday, Newsweek revealed a Cooper e-mail from July 2003 that showed that Rove indeed had talked to him about Plame and her CIA employment, although he apparently did not mention that she worked under cover.

This development apparently freed the journalists to hit McClellan hard at this afternoon's briefing. Here is a full transcript of the Rove-related queries.

***

Q: Does the president stand by his pledge to fire anyone involved in a leak of the name of a CIA operative?

MCCLELLAN: I appreciate your question. I think your question is being asked related to some reports that are in reference to an ongoing criminal investigation. The criminal investigation that you reference is something that continues at this point.

And as IÂ’ve previously stated, while that investigation is ongoing, the White House is not going to comment on it.

The president directed the White House to cooperate fully with the investigation. And as part of cooperating fully with the investigation, we made a decision that we werenÂ’t going to comment on it while it is ongoing.

Q: I actually wasnÂ’t talking about any investigation. But in June of 2004, the president said that he would fire anybody who was involved in this leak to the press about information. I just wanted to know: Is that still his position?

MCCLELLAN: Yes, but this question is coming up in the context of this ongoing investigation, and thatÂ’s why I said that our policy continues to be that weÂ’re not going to get into commenting on an ongoing criminal investigation from this podium.

The prosecutors overseeing the investigation had expressed a preference to us that one way to help the investigation is not to be commenting on it from this podium....

Q: Scott, if I could point out: Contradictory to that statement, on September 29th of 2003, while the investigation was ongoing, you clearly commented on it. You were the first one to have said that if anybody from the White House was involved, they would be fired. And then, on June 10th of 2004, at Sea Island Plantation, in the midst of this investigation, when the president made his comments that, yes, he would fire anybody from the White House who was involved. So why have you commented on this during the process of the investigation in the past, but now youÂ’ve suddenly drawn a curtain around it under the statement of, 'WeÂ’re not going to comment on an ongoing investigation'?

MCCLELLAN: Again, John, I appreciate the question. I know you want to get to the bottom of this. No one wants to get to the bottom of it more than the president of the United States. And I think the way to be most helpful is to not get into commenting on it while it is an ongoing investigation. And thatÂ’s something that the people overseeing the investigation have expressed a preference that we follow.

And thatÂ’s why weÂ’re continuing to follow that approach and that policy. Now, I remember very well what was previously said. And, at some point, I will be glad to talk about it, but not until after the investigation is complete.

Q: So could I just ask: When did you change your mind to say that it was OK to comment during the course of an investigation before, but now itÂ’s not?

MCCLELLAN: Well, I think maybe you missed what I was saying in reference to TerryÂ’s question at the beginning. There came a point, when the investigation got under way, when those overseeing the investigation asked that it would be Ââ€â€

[Josh]

Hmm... good old Turdblossom might actually be in trouble.

[Soontir948]

I would have never agreed to a press conference if I was going to say the same shit over again that willingly destroys my own credibility.

What an idiot.

[Josh]

I would have never agreed to a press conference if I was going to say the same shit over again that willingly destroys my own credibility.

What an idiot.

Well, dealing with the media for the regular press briefings is sort of McClellan's job, y'see. He's the mouthpiece of administration business and policies.

Frankly, the phrase 'Not enough goddamned money in the world to get me in that job' comes to mind.

[Soontir948]

I would have never agreed to a press conference if I was going to say the same shit over again that willingly destroys my own credibility. What an idiot.

Well, dealing with the media for the regular press briefings is sort of McClellan's job, y'see. He's the mouthpiece of administration business and policies.

I know he is, but he should've refused this one.

[frigidmagi]

Refusing it would have been has good has admiting it. This adminsteration has a phobia about showing weakness, they would rather look like idiots.

[Lord Stormbringer]

Refusing it would have been has good has admiting it. This adminsteration has a phobia about showing weakness, they would rather look like idiots.

Actually, I think they would have looked more like idiots if they had commented either way. Then the choices would have been truly foolish or criminal.

I personally think trumpeting this has more to do with disliking, or hating, Rove than with any accomplishment by the media. All this was was badgering a Press Secratary that really can't and shouldn't be commenting on the investigation. Sure it might score points in the political game that's beeing played but really accomplished nothing save heckling.

Personally, I find it interesting to see how the media is savaging Rove and ignoring the fact that media outlets printed it, beamed it on the airwaves, and virtually trumpeted it on high time and again. Yet Rove is the sole villian.

[frigidmagi]

The media never takes reponsiblity. You know that.

[Lord Stormbringer]

The media never takes reponsiblity. You know that.

I know it and find it rather depressing that of all of them, the media as a collective body will get away with it most easily.

Heck, they're already making themselves out to be martyrs in some of the news magazines. :x

[Josh]

I know it and find it rather depressing that of all of them, the media as a collective body will get away with it most easily.

Heck, they're already making themselves out to be martyrs in some of the news magazines. :x

Hypocrisy in the media?

Say it ain't so!

What we need is an organization that has administrative powers over journalistic ethics, so they can do as good a job of keeping the press clean as the American Bar Association has done for lawyers.

Or my preferred response, get drunk more often.

[frigidmagi]

so they can do as good a job of keeping the press clean as the American Bar Association has done for lawyers.

If they do has good a job has the ABA, wouldn't it have the same results and cost less to just go without?

[Lord Stormbringer]

You know, it's the things that aren't being told that make me think that the investigation should be completed, finished, and made public before people start calling for any one's head. I don't know what to make of this just yet, nor the whole thing really, but I'm wary indeed of people pimping their agenda with this.

Anyway, I thought I would repost this here.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/16/opini ... ey.html?hp

We are in the midst of a remarkable Washington scandal, and we still don't have a name for it. Leakgate, Rovegate, Wilsongate - none of the suggestions have stuck because none capture what's so special about the current frenzy to lock up reporters and public officials.

The closest parallel is the moment in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" when members of a mob eager to burn a witch are asked by the wise Sir Bedevere how they know she's a witch.

"Well, she turned me into a newt," the villager played by John Cleese says.

"A newt?" Sir Bedevere asks, looking puzzled.

"I got better," he explains.

"Burn her anyway!" another villager shouts.

That's what has happened since this scandal began so promisingly two summers ago. At first it looked like an outrageous crime harming innocent victims: a brave whistle-blower was smeared by a vicious White House politico who committed a felony by exposing the whistle-blower's wife as an undercover officer, endangering her and her contacts in the field.

But if you consider the facts today, you may feel like Sir Bedevere. Where's the newt? What did the witch actually do? Consider that original list of outrages:

The White House felon So far Karl Rove appears guilty of telling reporters something he had heard, that Valerie Wilson, the wife of Ambassador Joseph Wilson IV, worked for the C.I.A. But because of several exceptions in the 1982 law forbidding disclosure of a covert operative's identity, virtually no one thinks anymore that he violated it. The law doesn't seem to apply to Ms. Wilson because she apparently hadn't been posted abroad during the five previous years.

The endangered spies Ms. Wilson was compared to James Bond in the early days of the scandal, but it turns out she had been working for years at C.I.A. headquarters, not exactly a deep-cover position. Since being outed, she's hardly been acting like a spy who's worried that her former contacts are in danger.

At the time her name was printed, her face was still not that familiar even to most Washington veterans, but that soon changed. When her husband received a "truth-telling" award at a Nation magazine luncheon, he wept as he told of his sorrow at his wife's loss of anonymity. Then he introduced her to the crowd.

And then, for any enemy agents who missed seeing her face at the luncheon but had an Internet connection, she posed with her husband for a photograph in Vanity Fair.

The smeared whistle-blower Mr. Wilson accused the White House of willfully ignoring his report showing that Iraq had not been seeking nuclear material from Niger. But a bipartisan report from the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that his investigation had yielded little valuable information, hadn't reached the White House and hadn't disproved the Iraq-Niger link - in fact, in some ways it supported the link.

Mr. Wilson presented himself as a courageous truth-teller who was being attacked by lying partisans, but he himself became a Democratic partisan (working with the John Kerry presidential campaign) who had a problem with facts. He denied that his wife had anything to do with his assignment in Niger, but Senate investigators found a memo in which she recommended him.

Karl Rove's version of events now looks less like a smear and more like the truth: Mr. Wilson's investigation, far from being requested and then suppressed by a White House afraid of its contents, was a low-level report of not much interest to anyone outside the Wilson household.

So what exactly is this scandal about? Why are the villagers still screaming to burn the witch? Well, there's always the chance that the prosecutor will turn up evidence of perjury or obstruction of justice during the investigation, which would just prove once again that the easiest way to uncover corruption in Washington is to create it yourself by investigating nonexistent crimes.

For now, though, it looks as if this scandal is about a spy who was not endangered, a whistle-blower who did not blow the whistle and was not smeared, and a White House official who has not been fired for a felony that he did not commit. And so far the only victim is a reporter who did not write a story about it.

It would be logical to name it the Not-a-gate scandal, but I prefer a bilingual variation. It may someday make a good trivia question:

What do you call a scandal that's not scandalous?

Nadagate.