BushCo Wars: Revenge of the MSM


This is absolutely priceless stuff. This morning, the White House set up an “impromptu" teleconference (aka, photo op) between President Bush and troops stationed in Tikrit. Despite the assurances of spokesman Scottie McC and a Pentagon communications aide that this was a wholly unscripted event... it turns out (shock!) it was quite coached and scripted. Check out the Think Progress story for some of the transcript. Even the White House pool reporter actually reported on this:

WH Pooler Geoff Earle of the New York Post writes of the teleconference: “The soldiers, nine U.S. men and one U.S. woman, plus an Iraqi, had been tipped off in advance about the questions in the highly scripted event. Allison Barber, deputy assistant to the Secretary of Defense for internal communication, could be heard asking one soldier before the start of the event, “Who are we going to give that [question] to?”

Atrios has more:

CNN just showed a bit of the pre-interview clip. Rough transcript of Pentagon flunky addressing the troops:

The president's going to ask some questions and he may ask all 6 of them, all 3 of them. He might have such a great time talking to you. He might come up with some new questions. So what we want to be prepared for is to not stutter. If there's a question that the president comes up with that we haven't drilled through today I expect the microphone to go through to you Captain Kennedy.

Pay no attention to the man (or woman) behind the curtain... This is amazingly embarrassing for this tightly propagandized administration--Karl Rove must have a few other things on his mind.