The vaunted White House political machine had a full day to craft a compelling, persuasive response to Al Gore’s sweeping condemnation of the president’s warrantless-search program (among other things). They had time to work with language, do plenty of research, and come up with the best spin possible.<\/p>\n
And yet, they’ve got nothing<\/a>.<\/p>\n The White House accused former Vice President Al Gore of hypocrisy Tuesday for his assertion that President Bush broke the law by eavesdropping on Americans without court approval. “If Al Gore is going to be the voice of the Democrats on national security matters, we welcome it,” White House press secretary Scott McClellan said […]<\/p>\n McClellan said the Clinton-Gore administration had engaged in warrantless physical searches, and he cited an FBI search of the home of CIA turncoat Aldrich Ames without permission from a judge. He said Clinton’s deputy attorney general, Jamie Gorelick, had testified before Congress that the president had the inherent authority to engage in physical searches without warrants.<\/p>\n “I think his hypocrisy knows no bounds,” McClellan said of Gore.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Three points. First, the AP’s Nedra Pickler, who wrote the piece quoted above, mentioned McClellan’s claim about Clinton-era searches, but failed to explain to readers that the claim is completely false<\/i><\/a>. He-said\/she-said reporting is annoying enough, but this doesn’t even reach that level. It’s the kind of article the White House loves — it repeats the bogus claim with no fact-checking in sight. (Update<\/strong>: Pickler added a paragraph<\/a> to show how wrong McClellan is. The first version lacked this explanation.)<\/p>\n Second, it suggests the White House simply has nothing else to offer in the way of a response to Gore. Given 24 hours notice, the best McClellan and his colleagues could come up with is a demonstrably false claim. Where’s the creativity? The skillful spin? I’m disappointed with the mendacity, but also with the laziness. McClellan might as well mock Gore for inventing the internet<\/a>. It’s about as accurate and nearly as clever.<\/p>\n And third, I actually agree with McClellan on one thing: if Al Gore is going to be the voice of the Democrats on national security matters, I welcome it too. We could do a whole lot worse.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The vaunted White House political machine had a full day to craft a compelling, persuasive response to Al Gore’s sweeping condemnation of the president’s warrantless-search program (among other things). They had time to work with language, do plenty of research, and come up with the best spin possible. And yet, they’ve got nothing. The White […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6362","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6362","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6362"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6362\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6362"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6362"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6362"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}