Progress Pond

McClellan Briefing (and other sleaze)

Here’s the first photo of W’s and Condi’s love child! OMG! They’ve come out! Finally! And it’s on the WH Web site!



I think Scottie’s press briefing is about to start. It’s difficult to tell from the White House Web site (with video), and I see no notice about the briefing up at the Washington Post. Froomkin usually has this up, then writes about each briefing, and the WaPo often has live video. When it starts, it should be on C-Span or C-Span2, and is often carried in part on CNN and MSNBC.


While we wait in unanimated suspension, here’s the link to Tina Brown’s new column in the WaPo on Bob Woodward — “Anonymous Sources And a Known Quantity.”

… Contrary to some of the postings from the grassy knoll, I believe Woodward when he says he didn’t think the leak he heard about Valerie Plame’s job was important at the time. He probably did see it as gossip, somewhere between macho knowingness and just another routine drive-by shooting from the Bush crowd. The problem is that when Woodward hears political gossip it’s not a couple of lowly hacks at the office water cooler — it’s a transaction between one Big Beast at the heart of the power jungle and another. He hoarded the info for some larger reportorial purpose because that’s what Big Beasts do. …

And, below there’s some tawdry stuff on Judy Miller and the NYT from the NY Post (and the truth about that WH photo):
NY Post, e-mailed to me:

December 1, 2005 — YOU can take a guy out of The New York Times, but you can’t take the Times out of the guy. In a hotel bar in Columbus, Ohio, the other night, Post reporter Leela de Kretser overheard a drunken Southern gentleman ask another man what he did for a living, and get the reply, “I used to work for The New York Times before I caused it to implode. Perhaps you’ve heard of me.”

Stunned heads swiveled over to see infamous fabulist Jayson Blair handing over his business card. Blair ended up regaling several reporters — who were in Columbus covering the story of slain East Side dancer and Ohio native Catherine Woods — with his thoughts on the Judy Miller debacle. “I kept rooting for Judy to [bleep] up the paper more than I did, but not even she managed that,” Blair said. “It was like, ‘C’mon, Judy, c’mon!’ “


Later, Blair, who was in Columbus to talk to a lawyers’ group about mental health, had a twinge of conscience about his journalistic sins. “I shouldn’t have done what I did,” he said. “Is this gonna be in PAGE SIX?”


Update [2005-12-1 15:4:50 by susanhu]: BradBlog has this just in:

Good lord is this woman a whack-job or what? In a recent exclusive interview with BBC Judith Miller “apologizes” for helping lead the drumbeat that resulted in an endless war and thousands dead and wounded for life.

She said: “I’m deeply sorry our intelligence community got it wrong.


“I am deeply sorry that the President was given a national intelligence estimate which concluded that Saddam Hussein had biological and chemical weapons and a active weapons programme.”

Read all and view the video at BradBlog




P.S. The photo caption:


President George W. Bush is seen Thursday, Dec. 1. 2005 in the Eisenhower Executuive Office Building in Washington, as he poses for photos with U.S. Rep. Jessie Jackson Jr. and his children, Jessie Jackson III and Jessica, following the signing of H.R. 4145, to Direct the Joint Committee on the Library to Obtain a Statue of Rosa Parks, which will be placed in the US Capitol’s National Statuary Hall. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is seen at left. White House photo by Paul Morse

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