Remedial Grammar 101.

The White House, clearly fishing for anything it can to try and staunch the flow of public support away from the War in Iraq following the emergence of "former disgruntled employee" and ex-terrorism czar Richard Clarke into the public consciousness (and during the second-worst month of the occupation in terms of American casualties, to boot), is now attempting to attack his credibility based on his use of similes and metaphors. On page 246 of his book Against All Enemies, Clarke attempts to characterize the Bush Administration's overwhelming obsession with Iraq:

Nothing America could have done would have provided Al-Qaida and its new generation of cloned groups a better recruitment device than our unprovoked invasion of an oil-rich Arab country. Nothing else could have so well negated all our other positive acts and so closed Muslim eyes and ears to our subsequent calls for reform in their region. It was as if Osama bin Laden, hidden in some high mountain redoubt, were engaging in long-range mind control of George Bush, chanting, ?Invade Iraq, you must invade Iraq.?

This passage prompted Bush's spokesman Jim Wilkinson to make the following charge on Wolf "Man-Ho" Blitzer's program on CNN:

Let me also point something. If you look in [Clarke?s] book you find interesting things such as reported in the Washington Post this morning. He?s talking about how he sits back and visualizes chanting by bin Laden and bin Laden has a mystical mind control over U.S. officials. This is sort of X-Files stuff, and this is a man in charge of terrorism, Wolf, who is supposed to be focused on it and he was focused on meetings.

Of course Richard Clarke said nothing of the sort. Those of us who actually know how to use the English language recognized that the man had been using a simile - the "as if" is the dead giveaway - and not actually entertaining the notion that Osama bin Laden was chanting some kind of mind-controlling mantra from the caves of Tora Bora at the Oval Office and the Pentagon. Likewise, when I write:

"The rain came down as if Jesus were not merely weeping, but bawling His eyes out."

I am not necessarily an adherent of the belief that Jesus cries when it rains. C'mon, folks, it's not even like Clarke was using a metaphor! At least then the Bush Administration could have tried to make the argument that he was speaking literally, not figuratively; whereas here they're just proving themselves to be seriously grammatically-impaired.

And if you've been following the absolutely unbelievable story involving David Letterman and a funny bit of Bush photo-op footage, you know that the White House is humor-impaired as well. Instead of laughing off a skit where Letterman focused on the fidgety antics of a wealthy Bush backer's bored 12-year-old son that had been captured on tape, the White House apparently decided to call CNN the next day when the Letterman clip was highlighted in the news and claim that the footage had been doctored by Letterman's staff. Letterman denied this on his next show, in essence calling Bush's handlers a bunch of liars, which prompted a hasty retraction from CNN as to whether the White House had actually contacted them or not.

So if the Karl Rove Spin Machine didn't drop the dime, who did? And what does this say about CNN's credibility either way? In the one scenario they allow themselves to be duped by someone claiming to speak for the White House; in the other they're actually lying on Bush's behalf. To think that this was the network that during the First Gulf War had made a name for itself by staying in Baghdad when everyone else picked up and left (at the United States' behest, mind you) and daring to give the average American a different point of view from the one being spoon-fed out by the Pentagon is just plain sad.