Debunker Debunked

December 5, 2008

The mouthpiece has moved beyond the mouth.

hthomas Decider George’s front gal, Dana Perino, not the sharpest knife in the drawer, bit the lip of goofiness yesterday during an exchange with Helen Thomas, seemingly the only White House reporter with balls.
In a quiet way, Thomas showed Perino as schoolyard bully in some questions about Iraq WMDs.
(Helen Thomas photo found here).

dperino No wonder this administration is so wacked.
From Think Progress:

  • Defending Bush’s pre-war intelligence failure, Perino claimed that “other leaders from all around the world” thought Saddam had WMD. When Thomas noted that British intelligence — referring to the the Downing Street Memo — disagreed with Bush, Perino simply said that the memo had been “debunked”:
    Q: What about the chief of British intelligence saying you were going to fix the facts around the politics?
    PERINO: I think that that’s been debunked.
    Thomas quickly countered, “It’s never been been debunked.” Caught off guard, Perino admitted that she was the one who “debunked” it:
    Q: It’s never been debunked.
    PERINO: Well, it’s been debunked by me.
    Q: Good for you.
    PERINO: Good for me.

(Dana Perino photo found here).

Thomas has been covering the White House since JFK and about the only mainstream journalist who questioned Decider George on some of the dumb-ass shit he’s pulled the last near-eight years.
The 88-year-old Thomas was hit with an intestinal problem last summer, but returned with gusto in November to challenge the Bush White House on minute details, so much so, Perino quipped “we’ll let the sparring begin” when Thomas took her usual front row seat.
May Thomas continue for a 1,000 years.

In the Q&A yesterday — found on the video at the Think Progress post — Thomas asked Perino about Decider George’s legacy — who and how were they trying to re-make the shithead’s standing in history.
Perino blubbered about how she is top dog in that department: “No, I am. I have a team of people who’s helping talk about the president’s decisions that he’s made over the past eight years.”
She went to say “huge things have happened” during Decider George’s tenure.
Any of it good, however?

In response, Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post (via RealClearPolitics) hits it square on the legacy head in comments of TV Charlie Gibson’s recent “do over” question to the lame duck:

  • Observe the astounding selectivity of the president’s memory.
    Just imagine all the other do-overs he could have asked for.
    He might regret not paying more attention to the Aug. 6, 2001, presidential daily briefing memo, which was titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” and reported “patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks.”
    He might wish he hadn’t put the nation’s emergency response capability in the hands of Michael Brown, a former executive of the International Arabian Horse Association, and then watched from afar as New Orleans drowned.
    The president might have volunteered, as he did in a previous interview, that his “Mission Accomplished” photo-op on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln was a moment he’d like to have back.
    But no. Instead, he told Gibson that his “biggest regret” was a mistake made by others: intelligence analysts who got it wrong about Iraq.

If all else fails, blame others, then run and hide in de bunker.

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