Fleischer to resign as White House press secretary

Ari Fleischer, who has impressed me for years as a man who can deceive the public and the press with an unusual acumen, announced this morning that he will be resigning as White House press secretary this summer.

“I informed President Bush last week that after 21 years of doing nothing but government and politics…that I have decided that my time has come to leave the White House,” Fleischer said. “And I will leave later this summer, most likely in July.”

While it’s impossible to explain his expertise in deceit in a single blog post, Fleischer has done a remarkable job irritating the White House press corps with misleading, mistaken, and demonstrably false answers to questions for over two years.

The must-read article on Fleischer was Jonathan Chait’s “The Peculiar Duplicity of Ari Fleischer,” which ran in The New Republic almost a year ago. (I don’t know if it’s available to non-subscribers. If you check the link and it doesn’t work, sorry.)

In case you the article isn’t available, Chait explains that Fleischer was once dubbed “the flack out of hell” while serving as a GOP spokesman for the House Ways and Means Committee for his outrageous ability to lie brazenly and frequently — skills he took with him to the West Wing.

To be sure, his skills have been extraordinary. As Chait noted, “The typical press secretary shovels out fairly blunt propaganda, the kind reporters can spot a mile away and sidestep easily. But Fleischer has a way of blindsiding you, leaving you disoriented and awestruck.”

Making an important distinction between simple spin — which everyone in the business uses to the best of their ability — and Fleischer’s more direct dishonesty, Chait marveled at Fleischer’s flair for falsehoods.

“[W]hat Fleischer does, for the most part, is not really spin,” Chait said. “It’s a system of disinformation — blunter, more aggressive, and, in its own way, more impressive than spin. Much of the time Fleischer does not engage with the logic of a question at all. He simply denies its premises — or refuses to answer it on the grounds that it conflicts with a Byzantine set of rules governing what questions he deems appropriate. Fleischer has broken new ground in the dark art of flackdom: Rather than respond tendentiously to questions, he negates them altogether.”

A political communications class could devote several weeks of study dealing exclusively with Fleischer’s standard practices.

I’ll let you know about some of Fleischer’s potential replacements soon.