Pennsylvania Avenue Freeze-Out: Punished by Perino? Eric Brewer

Published: Tuesday February 12, 2008



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Print This Email This The following is the second White House report from Eric Brewer, who will periodically attend White House press briefings for Raw Story. Brewer is also a contributor at BTC News. He was the first person to ask about the Downing Street memo at a White House briefing. I didn't think the question I asked Tony Fratto on January 17 was that outrageous. It merely questioned the huge discrepancy between President Bush's year-ago description of the Iraqi government's domestic security "plan," and Iraqi officals' recent statements about that "plan." But evidently someone in the White House didn't like the question, because since that date, Press Secretary Dana Perino has repeatedly ignored my attempts to ask questions during the daily briefings. On January 23, I sat in the fourth row of the briefing room and held my hand up throughout the 22-minute session. Dana called on everyone else, including one other reporter in the fourth row, but she did not call on me. On February 5, I snagged a seat in the third row (all of the seats in the room are reserved for mainstream press organizations, but sometimes there are no-shows) and sat to the immediate left of Les Kinsolving. When Dana finished answering Les's two questions, she skipped over my raised hand and went to two other reporters seated to my left. Then she took two more questions from the front row before ending the abnormally brief 13-minute briefing. I still had my hand up. I tried again today, but, as Keats would put it, la belle dame sans merci was unyielding. This kind of thing has happened before, of course. Back when I was reporting from the White House for BTC News, Scott McClellan pulled the same stunt a number of times. And recently, Talking Points Memo was taken off the Department of Justice's email list after it did 682 posts on the U.S. Attorneys scandal. The question I wasn't able to ask today: "The U.S. military conducted 19 focus groups throughout Iraq last November and found that Iraqis from every ethnic and sectarian group are virtually unanimous in the belief that the U.S. invasion is the root cause of the sectarian violence in Iraq, and that the departure of the U.S. military is the key to national reconciliation. Has the President seen the military's report on these focus groups?" I decided to ask that question, because when Bush was talking about the "surge" in his last State of the Union address, he made the following statement: "The Iraqi people quickly realized that something dramatic had happened. Those who had worried that America was preparing to abandon them instead saw tens of thousands of American forces flowing into their country." If the President is going to talk about what the Iraqi people are thinking, he should have to answer questions about what the Iraqi people are thinking. Answer my question, Dana.



