Hey, for the second consecutive day the White House has posted the transcript to the morning gaggle, which is unusualy since they normally only post the afternoon gaggle transcript.
Dana Gets All Snippy About “Mission Accomplished”…
Q How quickly will the President deal with a bill? How quickly will he veto it once it arrives here? Can we expect it to be done the same day?
MS. PERINO: I’m not going to put a time on it. But I think — it will be very soon.
[snip]
Q Do you think — what do you think about the effort to time this with the fourth anniversary of the President’s declaration of the end of major combat —
MS. PERINO: Well, I noticed that yesterday there are anonymous Democratic sources who are saying that this was their strategy and that an on-the-record quote from the Senate Majority Leader’s spokesman saying that that is preposterous. I wonder which one is accurate. And I think that if it is the case that they withheld money for the troops in order to try to play some ridiculous PR stunt, that that is the height of cynicism, and absolutely so unfortunate for the men and women in uniform and their families who are watching the debate — and you would hope that that is not true, although it does make you wonder, why did the House wait so long to appoint conferees? There were no conferees appointed during that two-week break.
And I would just remind you that I know that our opponents for years have tried — have misconstrued that speech. I would encourage anybody who’s actually going to write about this to go back and read that speech and what it was about and what the USS Abraham Lincoln was doing, how long they had been gone, way past their six-month deployment. I think they were gone nine to 10 months. They were expanded, and their mission was accomplished. The President never said “mission accomplished” in his speech.
And I would just hope that the cynicism on the Hill doesn’t run that deep, but I wouldn’t put it past them.
Leaving The Door Wide Open For Helen Thomas…
Q Is it cynicism to want to bring people home to safety, instead of the daily killing that we see in Iraq?
MS. PERINO: No, Helen, that’s not what I was —
Q I mean, those words are very tough, very tough.
MS. PERINO: Helen, that’s not what I was talking about.
But that’s not what Terry’s question was. What I was saying is that it is cynical if they withheld money from the troops in order to have a PR stunt.
Q They’re not keeping money from the troops. They’ll put money in to bring them home.
MS. PERINO: Caren.
Which In Turn Lead To A Feeding Frenzy
Q Dana, on the “mission accomplished” speech, though, wasn’t the phrase something to the effect of, “the battle of Baghdad is over”? Clearly that’s not true.
MS. PERINO: I think it was — it was major combat. And I — it was major combat operations. And at that point, if you’re going back — I’m not the greater historian on this, since I was at the Council on Environmental Quality during this episode, but Baghdad did fall very quickly. [Chimpy actually said, “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.”] One of the things that we have learned over the years is how strong, first of all, that al Qaeda would be in Iraq, that they would set up this battle as, in their own words, the battle to win. And we did not know that their stoking of sectarian violence would do what it did last year. We had — at the end of 2005 and early 2006, you had the votes for a government and a vote for a constitution with millions of people in Iraq. And it looked like we were moving towards a period of political reconciliation. And then if you look at the marker of the bombing of the Samarra mosque in February of 2006, it really started this chain reaction, which is — then in the fall of 2006, the President heard the call of the American people who wanted to see a change in Iraq, and he underwent an extensive review, a comprehensive review which led to the new Baghdad security plan, which is now under way as General Petraeus —
Q Four years ago he said major combat operations were over. All those things happened after he said major combat operations were over. Wasn’t that a rosy scenario?
MS. PERINO: He said that — he also said that a transition from democracy — I’m sorry, the transition from dictatorship to democracy would take time. And — go ahead.
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