As much as I’d like to believe that the White House staff is in touch with reality, they keep giving me reasons to believe otherwise.
Take Press Secretary Tony Snow, for example. Snow appeared on Hugh Hewitt’s radio talk show yesterday, and insisted that the Bush administration has been fighting a “new media war” for quite some time. As proof, Snow pointed to Michelle Malkin as a soldier for truth in the “media war.”
“What is interesting, Hugh, and you know this as well as anybody else, you’re also starting to see little glimmers of guys like Michael Yon and others who get over there and they basically embed themselves in Iraq, and Michelle Malkin’s over there now.”
As Judd noted, several times during the interview, Snow referenced Malkin’s work on the Jamil Hussein “story.”
Now, Malkin is embedded in Iraq right now, and I certainly wish her a safe journey. But for the White House press secretary to reference Malkin, Jamil Hussein, and truth, at the same time, suggests Snow isn’t quite keeping up on the news as well as he should.
To be sure, Malkin has been obsessing over the Jamil Hussein story recently, but she’s also been entirely wrong.
…Iraq’s Interior Ministry acknowledged Thursday that an Iraqi police officer whose existence had been denied by the Iraqis and the U.S. military — and mocked by conservative bloggers in the U.S. — is in fact an active member of the force, and said he now faces arrest for speaking to the media.
Ministry spokesman Brig. Abdul-Karim Khalaf, who had previously denied there was any such police employee as Capt. Jamil Hussein, said in an interview that Hussein is an officer assigned to the Khadra police station, as had been reported by The Associated Press — and as AP has reiterated over the past month in lengthy statements and in interviews with E&P.
Confronted with the fact that she got the entire story wrong, for weeks, Malkin said, “I’m not apologizing for anything.”
Exactly which part of this does Snow consider a successful part of a “new media war”?