Day: February 21, 2007

A little follow-up by the hometown paper on the bellicose voice behind the “Nancy Pelosi’s plane is bigger” brouhaha shows why the public is over Republicans.

U.S. Rep. Adam Putnam (R-Bartow, Fla.) was out in front on the story, supplying quotes and moral high ground by claiming Pelosi wanted a more luxurious plane than her predecessor, Big Denny Hastert. But the 32-year-old wonderGOoP blames the media for starting it and says he was only exploiting the opening they gave him.

Ick.

Putnam now acknowledges he had no personal knowledge of any Pelosi request. He said he was commenting on an anonymously-sourced story in The Washington Times and additional coverage from CNN.

“This was a classic case where the media got out in front of us,” Putnam said. “Did we jump on it? Yes.”

And he is unapologetic about that. He calls the Pelosi plane story, whatever its legitimacy, “the first break [Republicans] have had from the media in driving our message since before the Mark Foley story broke.”

Let’s get this straight. Putnam sees Pelosi needing a plane that will fly nonstop to California instead of Illinois equivalent to former Rep. Mark Foley spending years pressuring teenage male pages for sex while the Republican leadership at best turned a blind eye and at worse, covered it up?

Ick.

But Putnam is just getting warmed up — he’s been appointed chairman of the House Republican conference committee.

It is the conference chairman’s responsibility to coordinate message and manage media relations for House Republicans. That means developing themes that counter and discredit an agenda set by the new Democratic majority. It’s a role Putnam has embraced in the new Congress.

…After Democrats swept to a congressional majority in November’s elections, Putnam moved up in the Republican leadership to conference chairman, the third-ranking House Republican position. Only Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, and the whip, Roy Blunt, R-Missouri, outrank Putnam.

And if you’re expecting him to play fair, forget it. Facts just get in the way of whatever makes the best story.

…a set of talking points titled “Air Force 3 – A symbol of Democrat Excess” remained prominently displayed on the regularly updated Web site of the House conference committee days after the story was discredited. It mentioned Pelosi by name and said she was pursuing “an unprecedented perk.”

Asked about the talking points Friday, Putnam responded: “You must check the Web site more often than I do.”

…Putnam blamed any unfairness in how the Pelosi plane issue was portrayed on the media that covered it, and he said he found it “curious” that reporters would question how the story spread.

I guess reporters should just accept these stories on their face and make his life that much easier.

Ick.

Too bad nothing will come of it:

In his closing argument, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the chief prosecutor, said that disclosure of Ms. Wilson’s identity was used by the White House to discredit her husband’s assertions that the Bush administration had distorted intelligence to justify invading Iraq. He said the disclosure of her name cast a cloud over the Bush White House in general and over Mr. Cheney in particular.

But Mr. Wells argued for the defense that when Ms. Wilson’s name was first disclosed in the summer of 2003, Mr. Libby had been so preoccupied with growing questions about the inability of United States forces in Iraq to find any unconventional weapons, a principal justification for going to war, that he did not have time to pay attention to the issue of Ms. Wilson.

“The wheels are falling off the Bush administration,” Mr. Wells said. “Thousands of young kids are on the ground there. It’s a crazy period.”

And:

Mr. Fitzgerald seemed for the first time to lend his weight publicly to the assertion by critics that Ms. Wilson’s identity was disclosed to punish Mr. Wilson and undermine his credibility.

Mr. Fitzgerald said the disclosure of Ms. Wilson’s identity had left “a cloud over the White House over what happened” as well as a cloud over Mr. Cheney because he had been behind the effort to counter Mr. Wilson’s charges.

Neither Mr. Libby nor anyone else was charged with unlawfully disclosing Ms. Wilson’s identity. But Mr. Libby was charged with misleading the grand jury and investigators.

“Don’t you think the American people are entitled to a straight answer?” Mr. Fitzgerald asked of the jury. He said that “a critic points fingers at the White House and as a result his wife gets dragged into the newspapers.”

He said Mr. Libby “made a gamble, he threw sand in the eyes of the grand jury” rather than tell the truth and risk being prosecuted for leaking her name.