Oh. My. God.
Tony Snow takes the idea of a "snow job" to an absolute art form. If you missed it, wmtriallawyer has a recommended diary up about the proper way to spin the findings of the Iraq Study Group.
Well, Snow must not have gotten that particular memo. Follow me to see what Tony has to say about the report.
I'm going off the live breifing here. We start with a question by David Gregory (NBC):
GREGORY: On the evaluation of the report - it says the following, the co-chairs say the following: "stay the course is no longer viable. The current approach is not working. The situation is grave and deteriorating." Chairman Hamilton says he is not sure whether the situation can be turned around. Can this report be seen as anything other than a rejection of this President's handling of the war?
Clearly David Gregory got the memo. Now let's see where Snow's at.
SNOW: Absolutely. And I think you need to read the report...
GREGORY: I have.
SNOW: You've read the whole report?
GREGORY: No - I've read the [unintelligible]
SNOW: I've read the whole report. And I will tell you also - based on the conversations - well, if you listen to the Chairman you will have noted that he's not trying to...
GREGORY: [unintelligible]
SNOW: David - please.
GREGORY: [unintelligible] report I'm telling you those are all quotes.
SNOW: I know. I know they're all quotes. I'm now going to proceed to try to place them in context.
Tony was visiby peeved, by the way. Parsing, I'd say the spin is about to begin.
SNOW: Number one - they are not trying to score partisan points or to look back. [Ed. note - sounds hauntingly like not playing the "blame game"] The second thing is that they understand the difficulties. They have adopted the goals that the administration has laid out. Why don't you - go back and read through some of these and I'll go back and deal with them.
GREGORY: Stay the course is no longer viable...
SNOW: Stop - I want to address them in their order and I'm going to forget, so I'd rather just let you do them one at a time.
GREGORY: ...the question is how you can hear these things and not conclude that it's a rejection of the President's policy.
SNOW: Number one, stay the course is not the policy, and you know the President's been saying that for months.
Pardon me while I pause here to scream loudly enough to cause my neighbors to call the police, fearful I am being brutally murdered...
SNOW: And if you take a look, what they're talking about is moving from so-called stay the course it is what - it is this: it is working on a process where the United States works as aggressively as possible to hand over governing repsonsibilies to the Iraqis, which is precisely what's going on.
If you listen to what Chuck Robb said, he's the one who gave the context to it - which is that you work on training up the Iraqis so that they can what - sustain, govern and defend themselves. Which is - we agree. And, so, stay the course is not an option. And in a situation where you have - to go on to the other point, where you've got a deteriorating security situation in areas of Baghdad - which the President talked about before the election in the press conference saying that that is a situation that was not acceptable and we needed to address. That in fact you look at this as somebody trying to make a constructive difference in a situation the realities of which we have discussed, and taking a look at policies many of which we find very interesting and certainly we're going to be talking in more detail about. But - you need to understand that trying to frame it in a partisan way is actually at odds with what the group itself says it wanted to do. And so, you may try to do whatever you want in terms of rejection - that's not the way they view it.
Hoo boy. First, if I'm reading the above correctly and heard it correctly, the Iraq Study Group basically issued a report that said that everything the President and the administration is doing is fine, they are all in total agreement about what is wrong and what needs to be done, and the administration is already doing these things. In fact, they have been doing these things for some period of time now!! Who'da thunk it??
GREGORY: Let me be clear - are you suggesting that I'm trying to frame this in a partisan way?
SNOW: Yes.
GREGORY: You are. Based on the fact that... based on quoting the report and the Chairman and I'm asking you a straight question which you're not answering straight - you're actually trying to answer it by nitpicking it...
SNOW: [unintelligible] No, here's the...
GEREGORY: You're suggesting that by quoting the report, I'm trying to make a partisan argument?
SNOW: [laughing] Let me put it this way. Where in the report does - what you have said is, "can you read this as anything other than a repudiation of policy" and the answer is I can.
Shocker.
SNOW: And what I was trying to do is explain to you, for instance - when you suggested that the stay the course is a repudiation of policy - not true. It's not administration policy. When you talk about the fact that there's a deteriorating situation - is that a repudiation of policy - no, it's something that we have acknowledged. So what you've asked is a series of bullet points each of which we have been discussing and addressing, and then you're asking if that is a repudiation of policy - no, it's an acknowledgement of reality, David.
GREGORY: Just one follow up - I want to be clear on what your argument is - it's not entirely clear to me - that...
SNOW: No, you're trying to frame this as an argument - we're reading it. We're taking this in.
GREGORY: I know. You're clear in suggesting that I'm trying to frame this in a partisan way - I've got you on that. You're suggesting that the representations of this report are in sync with the way the President has described the reality in Iraq and his policy towards Iraq.
Gregory so gets it. What a great question.
SNOW: Go through - rather than - because you'll accuse me of nitpicking - read it. I'm serious - I'm not trying to be snide. If you go through and you take a look at the metrics in the beginning, we've acknowledged that you've got a deteriorating situation in Baghdad. We have talked about the Al Qaeda problem in Ahnbar. We have discussed the importance of trying to come up with a transition where the Iraqis stand up and take greater responsibility. We've talked about the importance of having Iraqis assume primary combat control. And last week you had - or maybe even earlier this week - you have Major General Caldwell in Baghdad taling about a timetable that's a lot like the one that's in this report. And so what you have here, I think, is a basis for both political parties to be working together. We look at this as a very positive document. And rather than - again - I don't want to get into the business of trying to render judgment on individual recommendations - but I will tell you it was very striking to all of us in the room when you listen to Lee Hamilton, or you listen to Vernon Jordan or you listen on the other sie to Ed Meese or Sandra Day O'Connor. These are people who have said that they've never been in a commission like this before because they - because this [unintelligible] Washington bipartisan commission [sic] - you know that - this is not someone where soembody put on the ceremonial bipartisan hat and just went through the motions. These people worked very hard. And the one thing that they thought was absolutely important was to rebuild a sense of national unity on this and that is their overriding objective. And you can talk to Leon Panetta who made a point of that in the briefing that many of you attended on Capitol Hill or you can talk to the members individually. But that'll strike - it was something that we saw as positive and constructive and one of the things he said is, we're not coming here, Mr. President, to criticize you. We're not coming - what they said is - that this is an opportunity - they see an opportunity to come up with a new way forward. Well, Yeah. We like that. We like the formulation, it's what the President's been talking about, it's why he's instructed relevant institutions throughout this government to take a fresh look at what's going on.
Goodness gracious. Where do I start? I think boiling it down is the right way to go, to try to yield some truthiness rue to eat with that slice of humble pie:
- You're being a partisan hack, David.
- We haven't been saying stay the course.
- We've been talking about the problems.
- What the Study Group recommends is what we've been doing all along.
And there you have it, straight from Snow's mouth.