Tony Snow and the 18-Day Gap

   I guess that I am a little lax today as someone else beat me to my usual Tony Snow Comedy press briefing, but it was worth reading this below.

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Snow on the 18-day gap

By kos Daily Kos

on attorney scandal

Atrios watches TV:

Tells the reporter to ask Justice, and only provides:

I've been led to believe that there's a good response for it, and I'm going to let you ask them because they're going to have an answer.

He looked really really uncomfortable.

Anyone remember what Nixon's excuse was for the 18-minute gap?

And also via the Baby Blue Cherub, the Chicago Tribune digs up a juice old Tony Snow column from 1998:

"Evidently, Mr. Clinton wants to shield virtually any communications that take place within the White House compound on the theory that all such talk contributes in some way, shape or form to the continuing success and harmony of an administration. Taken to its logical extreme, that position would make it impossible for citizens to hold a chief executive accountable for anything. He would have a constitutional right to cover up.

"Chances are that the courts will hurl such a claim out, but it will take time.

"One gets the impression that Team Clinton values its survival more than most people want justice and thus will delay without qualm. But as the clock ticks, the public's faith in Mr. Clinton will ebb away for a simple reason: Most of us want no part of a president who is cynical enough to use the majesty of his office to evade the one thing he is sworn to uphold the rule of law.''

Ha ha ha ha! I can't wait to see Snow try and explain that one away.

Update: From the comments, the answer to my question about Nixon's excuse:

Nixon's new Chief of Staff Alexander M. Haig Jr. suggested the possibility that "some sinister force" had erased portions of the subpoenaed tape. President Nixon's personal secretary Rose Mary Woods was eventually blamed as having caused the erasure supposedly after she had been asked to prepare a summary of taped conversations for the President.

 

Technorati tags: Alberto Gonzales, scandal, Tony Snow

 

Republicans Who Voted to Kill Our Troops

Republicans fail to learn the Vote Vets lesson; still voting to kill troops

From Daily Kos

by Kagro X  Tue Mar 20, 2007 at 10:18:15 AM PDT

Congressional Republicans, Vote Vets and a couple of ex-Senators have a message for you:

This ad -- more powerfully than any other in recent memory -- exposed the truth about Republicans, and helped end the careers of several incompetent troop-haters, who finally faced the music over the bait-and-switch hypocrisy they'd been selling the voters for years. Under instructions from the National Republican Committee, George Allen, Conrad Burns, Rick Santorum, Jim Talent and others dutifully complied with their orders: say you support the troops, but vote to kill them.

This cold-blooded political manipulation cost thousands of brave Americans their lives over the course of four years, but only when the truth came to light did it cost these Republican traitors their jobs. Maybe it should have cost them much, much more, but the political system only gives us one option: dump politicians who vote to kill American troops.

Seems like a no-brainer, doesn't it?

Then you tell me why Republicans continue to vote unanimously to send unarmored, untrained, unrested (and even, Salon and the Hartford Courant tell us, wounded and mentally unstable) troops to Iraq.

In a recent vote, the Republican members of the House Appropriations Committee unanimously opposed requiring that the troops sent to Iraq be properly prepared for their mission and protected with armor. Again.

So who did it? Does one of these troop-killers live near you? Let's name names:

Alabama: Robert Aderholt
California: John Doolittle and Jerry Lewis
Florida: Ander Crenshaw, Dave Weldon and C.W. "Bill" Young
Georgia: Jack Kingston
Idaho: Michael K. Simpson
Illinois: Mark Steven Kirk and Ray LaHood
Iowa: Tom Latham
Kansas: Todd Tiahrt
Kentucky: Harold Rogers
Louisiana: Rodney Alexander
Michigan: Joe Knollenberg
Mississippi: Roger Wicker
Missouri: Jo Ann Emerson
Montana: Dennis Rehberg
New Jersey: Rodney Frelinghuysen
New York: James Walsh
Ohio: Ralph Regula and David Hobson
Pennsylvania: John Peterson
Tennessee: Zach Wamp
Texas: John Carter, John Culberson and Kay Granger
Virginia: Virgil Goode and Frank Wolf

In the days ahead, hundreds more Republicans will close their eyes to the reality so starkly portrayed by Vote Vets, and the political retribution so clearly visited upon their colleagues who failed to heed the basic message that America will no longer tolerate the Republican plan to abandon and expose our troops to preventable death.

The more who die, of course, the stronger becomes the Republican mantra that their deaths must not be in vain. For Republicans, more dead troops = more emotional heartstrings they can pull to continue their shell game. And the more heartstrings pulled, the more troops they're free to kill. It's the only part of the Iraq war that actually does pay for itself. Small wonder, then, that we're entering the fifth year of this war, sending yet more troops into battle, and still sending them without what they need to survive the fight. In any other setting and with any other players, the plan would be considered lunacy. But for Republicans, the blood of the troops has become the oil in their political machine.

There is no other plausible excuse for it.

And as surely as the sun rises, Republicans will later this week once again vote against armor for the troops. Why? Because George W. Bush says it will pay for them at the polls.

In 2008, whatever black magic George W. Bush has been using to accomplish this ghoulish deception runs out, and at long last the reality of facing voters who know the truth and have buried the dead -- the reality that cut short the blood-fueled careers of the worst offenders in the upper chamber -- will be visited on their weaker siblings in the House.

Democrats will be working overtime in the days ahead to make sure that it is so.

 

Technorati tags: Iraq, war, Republicans