Tony Snow admitted during the
May 30, 2006 Press Briefing that Bush "artfully worded" a statement about the resignation of Treasury Secretary John Snow.
Full statement below the fold.
Here's the context:
Q I'm a little bit confused on the tick-tock. You said that the job was offered to Mr. Paulson on May 20th, and they accepted the process on the 21st.
MR. SNOW: That is correct.
Q So we're talking more than a week ago. The President last week, when he was asked if he was -- how he was going to deal with Mr. Snow, said, well, I guess -- he said, he's going to offer his resignation to me, and then went on to say he's a -- good job. This was something that was in play obviously before that, so in terms of its filling a vacancy, which is how you characterized it a minute ago, it wasn't a vacancy, it was switching a person, wasn't it?
MR. SNOW: No, he said, he's not talked to me about resignation. That does not mean that there were not other discussions. I mean, it was artfully worded. But on the other hand, the one thing you do not want to do in a situation like this is to start speculating about changes before the changes are ready to be made. Those do have impacts on markets, and you have to be responsible and cautious in the way you deal with them. Again, at that point, Hank Paulson -- you've got to make sure that you've got all the clearances taken care of.
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At the time, I figured that someone would take notice of this--preferably someone in the White House Press Corps--and apply it as a standard for all Bush utterances.
Clearly, nearly everything Bush says is artfully worded. Since Tony was kind enough to admit it in this one instance, why should anyone outside his inner circle take him at his word for anything?
On a related note: I saw in the transcript of today's press gaggle how nimbly Tony Snow avoided commenting on this statement by Dick Cheney on Meet the Press: "The sort of debate we're having in this country about withdrawing troops from Iraq emboldens the terrorists."
Here is how Snow begins his response:
"Let's focus on what the vice president said, which is that withdrawal from Iraq would embolden the terrorists."
Clearly that is not what Cheney said, which is that debating whether to withdraw them is what does the embolding. Another example of misleading by artful wording.
Bush uses the same trick . When he was first trying to distract us from Katrina in the build-up to the 9/11 anniversary (ah, those were the days), he answered every challenge to his linking of Iraq to the War on Terror with the same way, with the same very specific, and therefore not-at-all controversial, denial that he ever said Saddam ordered the attack.
Naturally, no one ever said Bush said that. And it's pretty discouraging that his handlers needed to go that far to find something Bush could legitimately deny.