White House Press Secretary Tony Snow on the editorials running tomorrow in four papers that serve the military that will call for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation:
Q Tony, what about the editorials coming up at in the Times — Military Times Newspapers — Army, Air Force, Marines and so on?
MR. SNOW: A number of things. I mean, observation number one is everybody is entitled to their own opinions, but not to their own facts. And as a factual matter, the editorial — which is a uniform editorial that I guess all the papers are being told to carried — is just — it’s a shabby piece of work. I’ll run through some of it for you.
The other important thing to note is this — although these are Army Times and the Military Times, they’re a Gannet publication. A lot of people are thinking, aha, what you have are a lot of military people in open revolt against the President, when, in fact, you’ve got a lot of Gannet editorial writers, which would be thoroughly consistent with USA Today and the rest of the Gannet chain, which I think, if memory serves, does not have a single strong conservative editorial page in the entire chain.
He then goes through the editorial and accuses it of being, in essence, partisan hackery. THEN:
… And what they do is they revert to cheesy old partisan talking points about “mission accomplished,” which, as you recall, was referring to the mission of the USS Abraham Lincoln and the President, on the deck of the Abraham Lincoln, talked about a long, hard fight to come, and so on….
So BUSH SCHEDULING the landing on a ship with a big speech and a banner that just happened to be positioned behind him saying “Mission Accomplished” when he delivered a big speech is a Democratic talking point creation.
The White House later said the sailors were the ones who put the banner there — but GWB and his handlers clearly wanted him to be standing there to give out that message…which was as message also contained in his speech. The White House later pointed to loopholes in that speech as well to say they weren’t trying to say what everyone who watched it and wrote about it at the time knew they were trying to say). Does THIS positioning of the President look TO YOU as if the White House wasn’t trying to get this message out?
Snow then counters quotes in the editorial from military officials with other quotes..
S: So what you have in here is sort of a caricature — just today, almost in direct defiance of what the editorial is asserting, you had militias going in — you had Iraqi police going in and, according to one report, taking down 53 al Qaeda members. Now, that’s precisely the sort of thing that we’ve been talking about from the beginning, which is training up and making battle capable not only the Iraq security forces, but also Iraqi police forces.
Q Has the President seen or been told about the editorials?
MR. SNOW: He’s been told about the editorial.
Q His reaction?
MR. SNOW: His reaction was just to sort of shrug it off. I mean, he understands what editorial writers sometimes do, and in this case, they’re grandstanding. The notion that somehow, as the editorial says, that this is not intended to influence the elections — you’ve got to be kidding me. I mean, if they didn’t want it to influence the elections, they could have published it Wednesday.In addition, they clearly skipped school last week when General Caldwell was giving the weekly briefing, talking about the metrics in Baghdad and around Iraq. And I had laid that out before in a press briefing, as well.
Bottom line: Snow says he and the President are unimpressed, the editorials are shabby, not accurate and essentially partisan.
In other words: not worthy of serious consideration.
The same apparent attitude prevalent in the shaping and execution of Iraq war policy….
MUST READ: Balloon Juice’s Tim’s take on how Snow tries to deflect or deny. He nails it.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.