Zippy Ruins a Bush Talking Point

Ellen Ratner of the Talk Radio News Service called the Thom Hartmann show on Air America Radio at 11:35 AM PDT today to give an update on the Ed Henry/Tony "Zippy Longstocking" Snow debacle. For back-story, what I didn't include yesterday in my Gonzogate post (because the news was coming so fast and furious) was that President Bush turned cowboy, making all sorts of veiled threats when the Democrats started threating subpoena power for his officials. The Democrats, spines intact, voted to allow subpoenas to be presented to White House officials today. Let's hope they don't wuss out.

Anyway, Zippy gave a press conference today saying that the decision to fire the attorneys wasn't made by President Bush or anyone in the White House but someone underneath him in the Executive Branch hierarchy. At this point, Henry asked "If the decision wasn't made by a White House official, why is the president using executive privilege to prevent White House officials from testifying under oath on these matters?"

Zippy's response was classic: "That's an intriguing question."

That's it. Four words long. And he never came back to it, according to Ellen Ratner.

This proves one of three things:

a. They're lying about not authorizing the attorney firings and they don't want to be found out.
b. They're telling the truth about not authorizing the attorney firings but don't want to reveal that they exerted influence on certain people.
c. They didn't have anything to do with Gonzogate but don't want this to set a precedent for subpoenas on, say, election fraud in 2000 or 2004, or misleading the country into Iraq, etc. ad infinitum.

It's not that they fear Gonzogate will be a media circus, it's that they fear their cronyism will be uncovered. Zippy showed that when he destroyed Bush's talking point on not allowing officials to testify under oath. The whole Executive Branch makes me sick.

I'm just glad the media is waking up from their post-9/11 slumber.

~ Deep Blue