Why bloggers should be in the Whitehouse

The Washington Post website has a great column called White House Briefing, in which Dan Froomkin write about press coverage of the presidency. (It even has an RSS feed!)

In Tuesday’s excellent edition Froomkin discusses the second blogger allowed into the White House briefing room. He asked this question: “Back to the report on the botched WMD intelligence, have the massive intelligence failures documented in the report caused the President to rethink his policy of preventive war?”

The Post published the response from Press Secretary Scott McClellan with each of his sentences hyperlinked to a record of how many times he’d said almost the exact same thing before. I won’t bother reprinting here as it’s complete and utter bullshit and does not even begin to answer the question. You can go read it yourself if you want.

In the same column we find this exchange between CNN’s Elaine Quijano and McClellan:

“Q: Scott, you mentioned the culture of life. When Pope John Paul II wrote about the culture of life in 1995, he described it also in terms of the death penalty, not just abortion and euthanasia. He said that in these modern times, cases where the death penalty was warranted are rare, if not nonexistent. Now, knowing that the President fully supports the death penalty, used the death penalty, does he see it as a contradiction to use that phrase, ‘culture of life,’ and still support the death penalty, which the Pope expressed his opposition to?”

“MR. McCLELLAN: Elaine, I think the President’s views are well known. I don’t think now is the time to talk about where they may have differed on one or two areas. This is a time to honor a great moral leader, someone who, as the President said, was a hero for the ages.”

She continued to press on, but to no avail.

I also learned last night (on The Daily Show of all places) that the Pope called our Invasion of Iraq “a defeat for humanity.” But I guess Bush glossed over that one as well.