On the Futility of the White House Press Corps

I'm smarter than Les Kinsolving

At today's White House press briefing conservative buffoon Les Kinsolving managed to waste everyone's time in his usual fashion with this line of questioning:

Q There are news reports this morning that parents and children who were guests of the President, when they visited Congress, wore stickers with the wording, "I was an embryo." And my question is, since all of us were once embryos, and all of us were once part sperm and egg, is the President also opposed to contraception, which stops this union and kills both sperm and egg?

MR. McCLELLAN: I think the President has made his views known on these issues, and his views known --

Q You know, but what I asked, is he opposed -- he's not opposed to contraception, is he?

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, and you've made your views known, as well. The President --

Q No, no, but is he opposed to contraception, Scott? Could you just tell us yes or no?

MR. McCLELLAN: Les, I think that this question is --

Q Well, is he? Does he oppose contraception?

MR. McCLELLAN: Les, I think the President's views are very clear when it comes to building a culture of life --

Q If they were clear, I wouldn't have asked.

MR. McCLELLAN: -- and if you want to ask those questions, that's fine. I'm just not going to dignify them with a response.

This might have been amusing if it were Jesus' General doing the interrogating — asking McClellan about the rights of "Blastocyst-Americans" and such — or if Kinsolving were genuinely interested in critiquing the president's childish musings about a "culture of life." Instead, this moment underscored the utter banality of the White House press briefings, the daily burlesque show which the press corps itself has long since decided to attend only while nodding off in an alcoholic stupor. Scotty did his best to sound irritated with Kinsolving, who now writes for the diagnosably lunatic World Net Daily and sits somewhere among the press corps' top five in seniority. But everyone knows that Kinsolving's role is to run interference at these press briefings by cracking wise at the appropriate moments and consuming swaths of time that might be better spent asking America's Ombudsman about, say, torture, or the ongoing futility in Iraq, or the indictment of the Runaway Bride. Instead, we get a moronic Monty Python knock-off from a right-wing gasbag. All this came after an especially unhelpful, 15-minute experiment in bloviation as McClellan tried to explain his master's position on the Israeli security fence, Sharon's "disengagement" from Gaza, and the "Roadmap." In every respect, it was an all-too-typical embarrassment.