Q Any reaction to that study out from the Center for Public Integrity and the Fund for Independence in Journalism, where they did what they called a count of hundreds of false statements made by the President and top administration officials regarding the threat posed by Iraq -- and they counted in the two years after 9/11 --
MS. PERINO: I have to think that the study [isn't] worth spending any time on -- it is so flawed in terms of taking anything into context or including -- they only looked at members of the administration, rather than looking at members of Congress or people around the world. Because as you'll remember, we were part of a broad coalition of countries that deposed a dictator based on a collective understanding of the intelligence.
And the other thing that that study fails to do is to say that after realizing that there was no WMD, as we thought as a collective body that there was, that this White House, the President set about to make reforms in the intelligence community to make sure that it doesn't happen again.
--White House Press Briefing with Press Secretary Dana Perino, 1/23/08
If you need a little break from the deadly seriousness of the war in Iraq and all the lies that led us there, follow that link to the press conference, and load the video. When Dana Perino speaks, look away from the screen and just listen -- she talks so fast and has such a squeaky voice that she sounds like a tape being played too fast. It's like a press conference with the fourth member of Alvin and The Chipmunks -- Dana, the over-caffeinated squirrel.
She talks so fast that not only don't you have time to ask a follow up question, but you don't even have time to fully comprehend what she just said and formulate a follow up question. Even the White House transcriptionist can't keep up -- I had to change an "is" to an "isn't." Perino fired that response off in about half a second and had called on someone else before the questioner even knew she'd finished her answer.
I suppose that's her superpower. Spin isn't really her skill. Her answer pegs my BS meter. She argues that, because a lot of people believed the lies the Bush administration told about Iraq, the Bush administration can't be blamed for believing the lies too. It takes a second to rewire your brain to accept that argument.
The study Perino speeds past at the speed of light is a study by the Center for Public Integrity. And, while the reporter said it was "a count of hundreds of false statements," it's actually 935 -- nearly one thousand lies by Bush administration officials about Iraq. Bonus fun, it's all collected in a searchable database...
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