I may only be in my twenties, but out of all the White House Press Secretaries I've seen, Dana Perino is one of the worst. It has to be hard for her to continually spew the Bush Administration's garbage day in, day out. Unfortunately for her, if you tell enough lies, the dam holding back the truth will eventually spring a leak. One leak that Eric Brewer of RawStory found concerns the Pentagon's once-secret program to spread their propaganda about the war throughout the media.
From RawStory:
I had repeated my question as she walked away from the podium, "Did the White House know about the program?" And on her way out of the room, Perino answered, "I just said: no."(I just rechecked my own tape recording of the briefing, and that is what she said. I apologize profusely for leaving this crucial detail out of my earlier article.)
Of course, in her earlier answer, she really hadn't just said no—she'd said only, "I didn't know." But her denial of White House knowledge during that parting shot is very interesting, for reasons that Greenwald points out in the same post I linked to above: Glenn publishes emails from Pentagon officials dealing with the military analyst program that refer to weekly meetings with "karl," to having the analysts briefed by Bush's National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, and even to getting the analysts "in with potus" himself (that's POTUS, or the President of the United States). As Glenn sums up, rather understatedly I believe:
So in the process of discussing how to keep "their" TV military analysts "on message" regarding claims about the Iraq war, they talked about efforts to have both Stephen Hadley and Bush himself speak with the analysts -- proposals that had been discussed with "karl" (which, clearly, in this case, means Rove). That means Perino's denial was false and that the White House had at least some knowledge of and involvement in this propaganda program.
Uh oh. Dana has denied something that is clearly true. And it's looking more and more as if the legal opinion that she expressed about the Pentagon's propaganda program, "I don't think that that should be against the law," is just whistling in the dark.
Uh oh is right. This is another incident in the history of the Bush Administration where the law was willfully broken. Sometimes they get caught, sometimes not. The terrible thing is that none of them are in jail for it, where they belong.
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