Demagogue

Thanks to Landlubber for alerting me to CNN's discovery of the smoking memo. The crack investigative journalists at their substantial London bureau are to be congratulated for digging it up from the front page of the Times less than two weeks after it became the biggest story in the days before the General Election.

I just wonder whether the person who put the story together for CNN's webiste had any sense that the very article he/she was writing showed how slow on the uptake CNN had been.

Thursday, May 12, 2005 Posted: 0649 GMT

Eighty-nine Democratic members of the U.S. Congress last week sent President George W. Bush a letter asking for explanation of a secret British memo that said "intelligence and facts were being fixed" to support the Iraq war in mid-2002....

The Times of London newspaper published the memo -- actually minutes of a high-level meeting on Iraq held July 23, 2002 -- on May 1....

The White House has not yet responded to queries about the congressional letter, which was released on May 6.

Well, if they haven't responded, why don't you *(&(#&^$#ing ask them? Scott McClellan only holds briefings and gaggles every freaking day. I reported earlier that apparently none of the press corpse had asked him about the memo even once, nor had they asked Stephen Hadley or Condoleezza Rice when they had the chance. Well, they didn't ask him again at the Wednesday or Thursday press briefings. So if "the White House has not yet responded to queries," those queries seem to have come from someone other than the working press. I mean, it's not that McClellan has ducked the question or given some mealy-mouthed non-answer; they haven't even bloody asked him.

In short: WAKKER WORDEN!