Here's a fun one: in today's press briefing, Fox's Wendell Goler asked a question using the "some people say" formulation to claim that the BP oil spill is President Obama's Katrina, clearly hoping to put Robert Gibbs on the defensive. Gibbs wasn't having any of it, though, and fired straight back at Goler, ripping Fox for giving Michael "Heckuva' job" Brown an open forum to push the conspiracy theory that the BP spill was an act of sabotage welcomed by the White House. (Update: This is also known as "going BP truther".) By the end their exchange, Goler was reeling, dazed and confused.
Watch:
Transcript:
GOLER: It wasn’t just Fox calling this your Katrina.
GIBBS: No, but Fox had the very special and unique interview with Michael Brown — you opened it and I had to do it — who, for those weren’t let in on the big secret, Mr. Brown — FEMA director Brown under Katrina — intimated on Fox — and it wasn’t, I will editorially say, appear to be pushed back on real hard — that this spill was leaked on purpose in order for us to walk back our environmental and drilling decisions, and that the leak that we did on purpose got out of control and now is too big to contain. So, suffice to say —
GOLER: What is Mr. Brown’s attribution?
GIBBS: I can only wish that the network that you work for asked that prior to interviewing him yesterday.
GOLER: The reporters in here asked that. So I’m asking you —
GIBBS: You should call headquarters, my friend, and ask for somebody who makes the decisions to put people like that — because I’ve got to tell you Wendall, I’m not entirely sure a factual answer that I might give to any one of your questions is going to change the notion that your network put out the former FEMA director to make an accusation that the well had been purposefully set off in order to change an offshore drilling decision.
