Suddenly, the White House is shy — redux

July 15, 2005

After getting knocked around by an angry White House press corps on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, the White House and Scott McClellan scheduled no press briefings yesterday. And then announced there’d be no press briefings today.

After checking the transcripts, I found that this is the first time McClellan has cancelled briefings on consecutive, non-holiday weekdays since the first week in April — when the president happened to be on vacation.

You don’t suppose McClellan is avoiding reporters, do you?

I have a hunch he’s only making matters worse as the press corps not only thinks of new questions to ask, but gets irritated by the lockdown mentality. One of the first rules of crisis management is getting the facts out quickly. The White House must not care for the facts surrounding this scandal because they’re shutting down communications completely.

The Bush gang might assume that if they hunker down and keep their heads low, we’ll get bored, move on to a different subject, and forget all about this little criminal investigation. I don’t see that happening.

No, this won’t quietly fade away. However, I doubt Rove will be totally pushed out of the White House. Rumsfield still has HIS job. So, if Rove won’t be fired, who will be the scapegoat?

M.

  • No, the idea is for the surrogates to fan out and spread their BS. No McLellan means nothing to step on the talking points the other drones are pushing out, and also zero possibility of getting caught in a contradiction (always a problem as the talking points shift by the hour). Plus having Scottie repeating the “can’t comment on a continuing investigation” mantra 50 times in ten minutes looks silly. Last of all using the surrogates only means any talking point that goes over badly can be officially disavowed.

    And the WH press corpse was mean to Scottie for three days, so if they don’t like the silent treatment they can just act nicer.

  • Anybody want to speculate on what information the White house will release late tonight about this? After all, it’s Friday.

    Maybe a list of other White House officials that are subjects of the investigation, so they can get a jump on the inevitable leak of the info and start spinning before everyone is paying attention?

    I’m thinking it might not work so well this time. It’s probably just wishful thinking, but maybe the media is so pissed about this that they’ll make a point of embarassing the administation by mentioning the four year Friday news dump phenomenon over and over all week while reporting this story.

  • It’s plain that the right-wing media machine that’s defending Rove is getting its cues from the White House, probably even Rove himself. They’re guilty as sin, hence there’s no good way to spin this to the press corps, and that’s why they’re shutting down and leaving everything to the attack dogs who will deflect and lie until they’ve sown enough doubt on the whole thing that Rove gets off scot-free. Hopefully none of that will deter the prosecutor.

  • Anybody want to speculate on what information the White house will release late tonight about this? After all, it’s Friday.

    Rove’s promotion. Chief of Staff?

  • Are we at last at a point in these daily revelations where we can now consider the Bush administration COMPLICIT in these terror attacks?

    THEY HAVE BENEFITTED NO ONE BUT THE ADMINISTRATION AND ITS CORPORATE CRONYS.

    From 9/11 itself to date, these ARE ALL PLANNED BLACK BAG OPERATIONS INTENDED TO CREATE THE JUSTIFICATION FOR THE CURTAILING (DESTRUCTION) OF CIVIL LIBERTIES, THE UNLEASHING OF THE WAR MACHINE AND THE IMPOVERISHMENT AND DESTRUCTION OF THE MIDDLE CLASS.

    See who these pricks are for yourselves:

    http://www.newamericancentury.org

  • Marblex,

    Conspiracy theories aside, please refrain from using ALL CAPS. It really does come off as shouting. Thanks.

  • It’s also interesting how the press briefings have been cancelled at the same time that mysterious single “source” has popped up in the TIMES, the POST and the AP saying that Rove got his info from Novak. Scotty won’t have to stonewall that one today.

  • Gridlock

    the link is done by typing:

    [Insert text here]

    (take out the ” mark, I added it so the link wouldn’t work so you could see the code)

    The “Insert text here” is the text of the sentence that becomes an active link. So if I wanted to do your link above, I’d type the following (again, remove the ” in actual use):

    I read somewhere yesterday

    which would come out as:

    I read somewhere yesterday

  • lol it actually made the link. Darn, not sure how to write the code so it won’t do that. . . OK, try this. Here’s the code to write if you want to make the last sentence I wrote above (with the working link). Replace the “(” with “” (let’s hope this works!)

    I read (a href=http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/050714/ids_photos_ts/r781682535.jpg)somewhere yesterday(/a)

  • OK it worked, but it didn’t show the bracket to use instead of the parentheses. It is the hard angle parentheses as shown in the code CB put directly above the text box, below (where he talks about xhtml)

  • Eadie and Gridlock,

    You’ve almost got this HTML thing down, let me get you guys the rest of the way

    {a href=”www.webaddress.com”>your text goes here respectively and make sure to use the quotation marks around the actual web address.

    If you really want to doll it up a bit you could do like this:
    {b>{a href=”www.webaddress.com”>your text goes hereThe Carpetbagger Report

  • Let me try that again.

    {a href=”www.webaddress.com”}your text goes here{/a}

    and replace all of the curly braces with

    If you really want to doll it up a bit you could do like this:
    {strong}{a href=”www.webaddress.com”}your text goes here{/a}{/strong}

    Which will end up looking like this:
    The Carpetbagger Report

  • Well this text editor doesn’t seem to like the greater and less than signs.

    The above line should have read – Replace all of the curly braces with “”

  • Let me give it a shot. 🙂

    How to construct a link to <a href=”www.thattallguy.net”>My site</a>

    In theory, using ampersand-g-t-semicolon should generate a greater-than sign, and ampersand-l-t-semicolon should show a less-than sign.

  • Back to the subject, I think Churchill said it best – “Dictators ride to and fro upon tigers which they dare not dismount. And the tigers are getting hungry.” -11 November 1937

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