NP: iPod on shuffle

Responding to Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid's call for the president to "come clean" on how he's going to really, truly uphold the dignity of the White House like he said he would in the wake of the Abramoff scandal, press secretary Scott McClellan said, "This is more of the kind of partisan attacks that we see in this city that only lower the discourse in this town." He went further to "explain" that "there's a difference between responding to questions like that and engaging in a fishing expedition that has nothing to do with the investigation."

Parsing the adminstration's language is one of those gifts that keeps on giving. Or at least parsing the AP's parsing of that language. Meta-parsing! Nowhere in there is any real claim that Reid's points are not valid. If simply being partisan means the claims are unfounded, then Stephen Colbert is absolutely dead-on when he talks about "truthiness" with The Onion AV Club. But he doesn't seem to be saying that the claims are unfounded.

And the second bit just doesn't track for me at all. If there's a difference between responding to the question and a fishing expedition, then what's the harm in responding to the question? And if responding to the question implies, by this logic (?) that it is, in fact, a fishing expedition, does not answering the question imply that it's not a fishing expedition?

Like I said, the gift that keeps on giving. I'd look up the actual transcript, but that would take all the fun out of it.