Perhaps Snow should look for a different comparison

June 16, 2006

Reporters aren’t usually funny at the White House press briefings, but yesterday, one journalist — unfortunately, it’s unclear which one — delivered a great line during an important exchange with Tony Snow.

Q: Isn’t it a bit of a simplification to say that terrorists’ car bombs are obscuring the real picture? … You don’t think that’s a misrepresentation? After three years, Baghdad can’t be secured yet?

Snow: No. The President has said all along — what you’re expecting is facile, which is a snap victory, things easy. It’s not easy. This is a country where there have been factional disputes that go back a very long time. And people on the ground know that it’s not easy. No, they’re not facile at all in their approach to how they fight the war. I would also pose that to the people who are in theater. It’s not a facile explanation. It’s a true explanation: a car bomb is more vivid than getting an extra hundred kilowatts out of an electrical generation facility.

Q: Well, since they haven’t done that either —

Snow probably should have picked a better point of comparison. As of April, residents in Baghdad received an average of four hours of electricity per day, compared to pre-war levels of 16-24 hours per day.

If Snow wants a “vivid” example of success to counteract the car bombs — or the shoe bomb that killed 10 Iraqis at a key Shi’ite mosque this morning — he’ll have to look harder.

Remember, CB, this is the administration that creates reality. If Tony says enough times that it’s a sunny day in Baghdad with ample electricity, then it is. Wishing makes it so because there will be no consistent press or Democratic talking points to make sure that people realize that it’s not. This whole administration is built around that premise and it’s still working for them to a great degree.

  • “If Snow wants a “vidid” example ” – CB

    typo 😉

    Snow needs to really study up to do this job right. But that is not expected of a Bushite. Policy Wonks they don’t want to be. If they became Policy Wonks, they might declare the north-west Hawaiian islands a national monument to prevent exploitation and protect the region.

    So clearly, that is something to avoid 😉

  • How quickly Snow forgot the VPs remarks about the war lasting “a few weeks, a few months tops.”

    If the president expected the road to victory to be hard, would he have ordered so few troops in and had his “mission accomplished victory party so soon after the start of the war? Where McClellan obfuscated Snow outright lies.

  • “No. The President has said all along — what you’re expecting is facile, which is a snap victory, things easy.”

    What about that Mission Accomplished Banner on the USS Abraham Lincoln some two months after the invasion?

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