Bush v. Baker

So it was obviously O'Sullivan.

That was only the latest in a series of briefings that should have been on the record. Yesterday morning, press secretary Tony Snow and counselor Dan Bartlett apparently made a clumsy transition to senior administration officials; later in the day, Snow joked around: "I am joined by my close personal friend, Senior Administration Official."

Not funny.

As Mark Silva blogs in the Chicago Tribune: "It is a loathsome practice, this Washington-based practice of attributing anything to anonymous senior administration officials. It corrodes public confidence in journalism -- is everyone sure that we are actually quoting a real person, or only making it up? We are not making it up, I can assure you. And it should corrode public confidence in government. Is anyone wondering why senior members of our government cannot speak with authority, in the deliverance of civil comments, with their names attached? Is that Washington's idea of accountability? Or deniability?"

The Snub

The schedule was clear: Bush and Maliki were to start their two-day summit with a pre-dinner meeting at the Raghadan Palace with Jordanian King Abdullah yesterday evening. But at the last minute, Maliki was a no-show.

Could that have had anything to do with yesterday's leak of a highly critical memo about Maliki from national security adviser Steve Hadley? (See yesterday's column.)

White House aides were at a loss to explain precisely how the meeting was suddenly cancelled -- but the one thing they knew for sure, no doubt about it, absolutely, was that it had nothing to do with the memo, and was not a snub.

This posed a bit of a conundrum from the press corps: Should they take that preposterous assertion on face value? Or should they call the White House aides liars? Not surprisingly, most reporters decided to steer a middle course, and let the readers connect the dots.

Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Edward Wong wrote in the New York Times: "Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq and King Abdullah II of Jordan abruptly backed out of a meeting with President Bush on Wednesday, leaving the White House scrambling to explain why a carefully planned summit meeting had suddenly been cut from two days to one.

"The decision occurred on a day that a classified White House memorandum expressing doubts about Mr. Maliki was disclosed and after Iraqi officials loyal to a powerful Shiite cleric said they were suspending participation in the Maliki government because he had ignored their request to cancel the Bush meeting entirely.

"The president and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice were already aboard Air Force One, on the way to Amman from Riga, Latvia, where they had been attending a NATO summit meeting, when they received the news by telephone from the United States ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad. The White House insisted Mr. Bush was not upset and had not been snubbed.

"'Absolutely not,' said Dan Bartlett, counselor to the president."