From Salon:

In his new book, Al Gore accuses the Bush administration of making “bold and confident assertions” that left a majority of Americans thinking that Saddam Hussein was linked to al-Qaida and had a hand in the attacks of 9/11.

Asked about the charge at the White House today, press secretary Tony Snow said that Gore must be “listening to people who have deliberately misled him” because the president never suggested any such thing.

OK, then, a reporter asked, what about the vice president? Didn’t Dick Cheney maintain that there was an operational link between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein? Didn’t he raise the specter of a pre-9/11 meeting between Mohamed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence official?

“Right,” Snow said, “but that’s an entirely separate issue” from the charge that Gore is making.

Really? When Tim Russert asked Cheney in September 2003 about a poll showing that 69 percent of the American public thought Saddam was involved in 9/11, Cheney said he wasn’t surprised that so many people had reached that conclusion. Among his reasons: “With respect to 9/11, of course, we’ve had the story that’s been public out there. The Czechs alleged that Mohamed Atta, the lead attacker, met in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official five months before the attack, but we’ve never been able to develop any more of that yet either in terms of confirming it or discrediting it. We just don’t know.”

My comment here is not about Gore’s assertion, which is true. It’s not about Tony Snow’s rebuttal, which is false. My beef is that I have been reading this same crap for the last 4 years. Someone accuses the White House of linking al-Qaida to Iraq. The press asks the press secretary about it. The press secretary pretends it never happened. The press reports his answer. Bloggers get incensed and point out the same Meet the Press interview or Bush’s speech or whatever and then we wait for the next time when we can engage in the same exact back-and-forth all over again.

I feel like George Jetson on the treadmill with Astro. I’m sick of this whole charade where the press feels like they have done their job by asking the same question and then writing down the press secretary’s response, which is, guess what? always exactly the same. I don’t think the administration should be let off the hook, but I am getting sick of every side in this “debate,” including my own.