George Bush’s greates failure as a President, bar none, is this:
Not having Tony Snow on board earlier. McLellan let the inmates run the asylum. It’s good to see Mr. Snow reining in the moonbats of the DC press corps.
Q Let me ask you this, because I suppose another way of looking at this is if somebody hadn’t flipped, if somebody hadn’t tipped off everybody, Zarqawi would not have been targeted. So a lot of this is dependent on another terrorist, perhaps, wanting to see Zarqawi dead so that they could move into the created vacuum.
MR. SNOW: That would be a really stupid terrorist, because the life expectancy of people who have been succeeding these guys, and the life expectancy of being Zarqawi’s number two has not been very good. So if somebody was trying to tip off Zarqawi in sort of a Machiavellian attempt to re-jigger things, I think they ought to think twice because what is happening – and we’ve seen this and we’ve heard reports of it, but I think this dramatizes it – the Iraqi people are saying, we’ve had it with these guys. We’ve had it. We’re not going to take it anymore. And that is an important step. And this is the kind of thing that can reinforce those who want to go ahead and stand up against terror in their midst.
<…>Q To follow up on this, Tony, can you walk us through, if you can, the actual way this tip came down? Was it –
MR. SNOW: No, absolutely not. Absolutely not. No operational details.
<…>Q You’ve talked about the PR effect of this – you talked that it sends a signal and a message –
MR. SNOW: Let me – I want to be careful. This is not PR. PR is selling soap. This is trying to build a basis for democracy. I really wouldn’t want to dismiss what has happened – this was not a PR move. This was an important security move going after the guy who amounted to the top field general for terror in Iraq. Go ahead…
Hat tip to BlackFive