|
For reporting that is an embarrassment to the profession of journalism, and for being beholden to corporate paymasters rather than the citizens of America.
Okay, Ms. "Once a Bushie, Always a Bushie" Perino
qualifies as a member of the media because while in college
she studied journalism and did stints as a stringer. So her
training is in reporting, even if her career as an adult is
specializing in propaganda. And when Will Wyche of Palm Springs,
California, nominated her, she was an easy choice.
In case you've been missing in action, the latest White House
Press Secretary laughingly revealed that she was asked a question
about the Cuban Missile Crisis recently and didn't know what
it was.
As recorded on NPR's "Wait, Wait…Don't Tell Me" program,
Perino fessed
up:
"I was panicked a bit because I really don't know
about … the Cuban Missile Crisis," said Perino,
who at 35 was born about a decade after the 1962 U.S.-Soviet
nuclear showdown. "It had to do with Cuba and missiles,
I'm pretty sure." So she consulted her best source. "I
came home and I asked my husband," she recalled. "I
said, 'Wasn't that like the Bay of Pigs thing?' And he said,
'Oh, Dana.'"
The astounding thing about that, beyond that Bush's chief spokesperson
is as clueless as she is, is that she answered the question
as if she did know about the time when the U.S. and the Soviet
Union almost began a nuclear war.
Apparently in October, a White House correspondent asked Perino, "Do
you want to address the remarks by President Putin, who said
the United States setting up a missile defense shield in Eastern
Europe was like the Soviet Union putting missiles in Cuba,
setting up a Cuban missile crisis?"
"Well, I think that the historical comparison is not --
does not exactly work," Perino responded at the time.
So, as is the course of formulaic evasions at the Bush White
House, Perino asserted that a comparison of which she had no
knowledge didn't work. Oh heck, it's just like a game of tennis
anyway. What does honesty and the truth have to do with it?
Now, that's some media putzdom, all right.
Perino proved, with the Cuba gaffe, that her role is not to
answer questions but rather to parry them away.
We are so pleased to bestow this week's BuzzFlash Media Putz
Award on such an artful dodger. Perino doesn't really need
to know much of anything, just a few stock phrases that can
be interchanged as a means of deflecting troubling questions.
In any case, the Busheviks are proud that they don't know much
about history. After all, didn't they boast that they are too
busy creating new realities to worry about the past?
And, indeed, what a disastrous reality they have created.
|
