white house: killer of truth

Whoa, brava Cintra! You've outdone yourself. Awesome.

Cintra Wilson has published a breathtaking and devastating opus on Salon: I invaded the white house press corps.

Dirty business, but someone's gotta do it.

Usually Salon publishes pieces this long in two parts; perhaps they had reason to believe part two might get squashed once the VRWC* saw part one.

Wilson describes the main players in the press briefing room for us, and gives anthropological/sociological analyses of each of their secondary roles. She brings the atmosphere to life, with its baiting, its frustration, its breakdowns, and its ultimate realization that the job of the White House spokesman is to Reveal Nothing. Ever. And how robotically, diabolically good he is at it.

Fans (mourners) of "Six Feet Under" will especially love this:

Scott McClellan is the Undertaker of Information.

With the gentle sterility of a mortician, McClellan puts a dark suit on every day and tells us, in a soothing voice, how comfortable our beloved information will be now that it is dead and resting in an attractive coffin. The press -- outraged family members of the strangled Truth -- wail, "But Scott, it wasn't dead before you guys got your hands on it!" And the Undertaker, unruffled, sympathetic and appropriately somber, politely informs you that it is part of an ongoing investigation, and he
believes he has already told you what the president's comments were on that.

After a while, it is sickeningly passive-aggressive.

But the bottom line is, Scott is telling the truth: The truth is dead. And you're never going to see it again. It's in heaven now, with Chandra Levy and JonBenet Ramsey and Nicole Brown Simpson. He understands your grief, but getting angry won't bring it back.

I guess all of us expecting journalists to rally and storm the barricades are just plain naive. It may indeed be their job to ask the hard questions and demand answers, but it's very obviously a waste of time asking them in the White House press briefing room. So perhaps we might ask why these very senior journalists are going there day after day? Are they just idiots? Are their managing editors idiots?

What if they just didn't show up? Who would Scott blather to?

What if, instead of showing up and wasting everybody's time with this horrendous mind-fucking, they all just wrote editorials/opinion columns about what's REALLY going on? And what if they didn't stop until something more earth-shaking than the announcement of a new Supreme Court justice happened?

*vast right-wing conspiracy