Great hit by Dana Perino on Sy Hersh today at the White House:

Q: This weekend the New Yorker magazine came out with an article claiming that this summer the President, or at least the White House in general, asked the Joint Chiefs to redraw plans to attack Iran. Is that true?
MS. PERINO: Look, you know, I’m glad you brought it up. Every two months or so, Sy Hersh writes an article in The New Yorker magazine, and CNN provides him a forum in which to talk about his article and all the anonymous sources that are quoted in it.

Meantime, looks like the freedom memo hasn’t yet hit the White House press corps:

Q Dana, a couple on Burma/Myanmar.
MS. PERINO: Burma. (Laughter.)

What, no follow-up on the Falklands/Malvinas?

It’s not often the White House press corps gets called offensive, but it happened today.

From the press briefing with White House spokesperson Dana Perino.

MS. PERINO: On the speech — your question about the speech, the drafts are circulated, and there was an error made in trying to make sure that interpreters had what they needed. I don’t know how the draft of the speech — it was not final — was posted, but it was, and it was taken down. There’s really nothing more to say about it.
Q And they were phonetic spellings of various countries — as well, we understand.
MS. PERINO: That’s not unusual. We do that for many speeches.
Q Does the President have a hard time pronouncing some of these countries’s name?
MS. PERINO: I think that’s a offensive question. I’m going to just decline to comment on it.

We’ve frequently been critical in this space of some of the questions the White House press corps asks.

We pause that criticism for the moment to celebrate something we don’t see often from the reporters — honest-to-goodness funny.

From today’s White House gaggle with Dana Perino:

PERINO: At 10:15 a.m., the President, along with his father, President Bush 41, and his brother, Jeb, went out on a boat, probably casting a line. They’re taking advantage of the great outdoors, it’s one of the things that this family loves to do when they come up here in the summertime. I wouldn’t expect a lot more readout out of Walker’s Point. They do a lot of what other families do when they get together for family vacations –

Q Bicker?

Fishbowl DC posts this shot of CNN wishing Helen Thomas a happy birthday.

Helen hasn’t looked this happy since Ariel Sharon was elected.

Truth be told, my knowledge of fancy media terms doesn’t go much beyond the word aspirin.  And it’s always refreshing — and praiseworthy — when the White House press corps acknowledges intellectual limitations.

Still, this reporter’s exchange today with White House press secretary Tony Snow sure is fun to read:

MR. SNOW … So the President is in good health, there was no reason for alarm, fairly routine diagnosis and also procedure and, again, he will next get a colonoscopy three years hence.

Q Could you make that a little bit simpler? I don’t understand all those medical words you used. Is there any trace of cancer?

MR. SNOW: No.

Given how hot it is today, perhaps the White House and press corps erred in the pricey renovation of the briefing room.  Might have been wiser to restore the swimming pool.

From today’s White House news briefing:

Q The Media Research Center had deplored Time Magazine’s leaving President Bush out of their 100 most influential people list. And my question: Does the President regret being left out of a list that includes Rosie O’Donnell, Osama bin Laden, and Al Gore?

DANA PERINO: No, but the feeling is mutual. (Laughter.)

Earlier this week, we noted a member of the White House press corps asking Tony Snow about the role mangoes are playing in America’s foreign policy.  (We kidded you not then, and we kid you not now).

As always, the folks who’ve advanced the story farthest are the happy-go-lucky upper managers at Fishbowl DC, which posted this photo of an actual member of the White House press corps holding the actual mangoes.  Unclear how the mangoes got through security — and no word whether the Secret Service immediately detained the mangoe for questioning.

The national killjoy has thrown another tantrum.

We read in today’s Washington Post “Reliable Source”:

The New York Times has — once again — decided to pull out of the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. Op-ed columnist Frank Rich wrote Sunday that the Gray Lady will “end its participation in such events” and said he believes that attending the black-tie bash insidiously supports the administration’s agenda. (Worse than faulty WMD reporting? Harsh, dude.)

The column helpfully points out that

Of course we remember that the newspaper also officially boycotted the annual press prom in 1999. Said then-D.C. bureau chief Michael Oreskes: “The whole thing has become unseemly. It’s the whole circus atmosphere,” although some of its reporters just couldn’t stay away. This year, the Times bought two tables and invited Karl Rove (setting the scene for his dust-up last month with Sheryl Crow).

Maybe the Times would have left the dinner happier if Rich Little had done an impression of Adolph Ochs?

With Tony Snow coming back to work next week, it’s worth now clearing up one matter involving Dana Perino and Jon Stewart.

Think Progress posted this two weeks ago:

At today’s White House press briefing, spokeswoman Dana Perino said that setting a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq is like sending a “save-the-date card to the Iraqis.” She added, “I stole that from Don Stewart,” referring to the host of the Daily Show.

Wrong.  Perino didn’t confuse Jon Stewart’s name.  She said “Don Stewart” and she meant “Don Stewart.”   Sources tell Extreme Mortman that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s spokesman Don Stewart was the first to use that line.