Today was Tony Snow’s first day behind the briefing room podium. How’d it go? Well, after Helen Thomas asked about the NSA monitoring millions of Americans’ phone calls, possibly illegally, Snow gave a rather predictable response.<\/p>\n
“What’s interesting is, there seems to be a notion that because the president has talked a little bit about one surveillance program, and one matter of our intelligence gathering, that somehow we have to tell the entire world, we have to make our intelligence gathering transparent.<\/p>\n
“Let me remind you, it’s a war on terror. And there are people — I guarantee you — the president is not talking about breaking the law, but al Queda does not believe in transparency. What al Queda believes in is mayhem and the president has a constitutional obligation and a heartfelt determination to make sure we fight them.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
So, al Queda does not believe in transparency — and as far as Tony Snow is concerned, the White House won’t either. Has the Bush gang not learned yet how absurd this comparison is? That there’s no sense in defending our government’s dubious conduct by equating our behavior with our enemies’ behavior?<\/p>\n
On the substance, it’s the same kind of straw-man charade we’ve always gotten from the Bush White House. As Snow framed it, the president’s critics want a “transparent” intelligence-gathering process. As proof, he pointed to … no one in particular. Who believes intelligence gathering should be transparent? The president’s critics want a legal<\/i> intelligence-gathering process that includes checks and balances. Snow, like his predecessors, is more comfortable attacking critics who don’t exist than dealing with legitimate questions.<\/p>\n
That said, Snow’s first briefing was a bit of a change of pace. If Scott McClellan were behind the podium responding to the same question, he would have referenced 9\/11 at least four times. Snow is to be congratulated for his restraint.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Today was Tony Snow’s first day behind the briefing room podium. How’d it go? Well, after Helen Thomas asked about the NSA monitoring millions of Americans’ phone calls, possibly illegally, Snow gave a rather predictable response. “What’s interesting is, there seems to be a notion that because the president has talked a little bit about […]<\/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-7429","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7429","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=7429"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7429\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7429"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7429"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7429"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}