Josh Marshall calls "Bullshit" on Tony Snow

It's getting harder for the White House press secretary to get away with the usual bullshit. Maybe all that time at Faux News dulled his senses but he doesn't seem to realize that there are a lot of well-connected, smart people out here who are not only collecively very knowledgeable but who also have access to one (or both) of George Bush's "Internets" in a pinch. Josh Marshall has been all over Tony Snow's Battle of the Bulge comment and... well I'll let him tell it in his own words:

Okay, back on Monday we discussed Tony Snow's comments about how if polls had been taken during World War II's Battle of the Bulge people would probably have been pushing for a change in the course of the war as they are now in Iraq.

That's actually an insult to the American people generally, as well as the men who fought World War II and those who supported them on the homefront.

In any case, Snow clearly believes he can get away with this malarkey because he thinks polls weren't taken at the time.

But he's wrong. They were taking them. And they pretty clearly belie Snow's whole point.

[...]

the basic picture is clear: the American people then, as they will now, will stick through a lot of adversity if they think the war they're fighting matters and that their president knows what he's doing.

Then they did. Now they don't.

Also, this isn't just a gotcha on Tony Snow, showing the existence of polls he wasn't aware of, and so forth. There's a serious underlying point here about the administration's basic frivolousness in its conduct of the war.

No one thinks you can fight a war or conduct any project of great consequence by following minor oscillations in polls. But long term and imbedded trends in public opinion mean something. In this case, the public can see President Bush doesn't know what he's doing.

Having his flacks go out and compare him to great wartime leaders of the past and insult the American people in the process doesn't change that.

Good post on the same subject by Steve Gilliard at FDL entitled Deep in the Snow…Job.