THE MEANING OF "YES"

The wingnuts rarely fail to bring up Clinton's "the meaning of 'is'" statement when talking about lies from the criminal Bush regime. Tony Snow moves from a 2-letter word to a 3-letter word when discussing the meaning of FBI Director Mueller's testimony today.

On HARDBALL (7/26/07), Matthews plays this clip for Snowjob:

REP. SHEILA JACKSON LEE (D), TEXAS: ... have an understanding that the discussion was on TSP?
ROBERT MUELLER, FBI DIRECTOR: I had a understanding that the discussion was on an NSA Program, yes.
LEE: I guess we use TSP, we use warrantless wiretapping, so would I be comfortable in saying that those were the items that were part of the discussion?
MUELLER: It was -- the discussion was on a national -- an NSA program that has been much discussed, yes.

Matthews then raises the OBVIOUS point:

MATTHEWS: Well, it seems to me, Tony, watching this -- and mean objectively -- he`s saying to her, Yes, you`re right, it`s the one that`s been discussed for those last few days...

SNOW: No, it...

MATTHEWS: ... that`s what we`re talking about.

SNOW: All I can tell you, Chris...

MATTHEWS: What else could he possibly mean besides the word "yes"?

SNOW: What -- what he could possibly mean is it`s a lot more complex and that she knows, or maybe she doesn`t know, that there are a series of classified matters under conversation, and I can`t go any further. Here I am, I got my hands tied, too. Members of Congress have been briefed in on this program, and they`ve been briefed in on the conversation, at least a small number of them have. But what`s going on now is that people are trying to go ahead and take a little sliver of it, exploit it, and try to create a misperception here. And it`s one of these things where you saw that the FBI director could not and did not answer in detail because he is not going to talk about highly classified matters.

Matthews did NOT come back with the OBVIOUS follow-up: Why didn't Director Mueller say that he would like to discuss this in a closed session?

To be fair, Matthews did point out that others have also contradicted Abu Al Gonzales:

MATTHEWS: Well, let me ask you, what happens when one side of an argument is put out by the then acting attorney general, Mr. Comey, documents from Negroponte, Ambassador Negroponte, which support that, and now the current FBI director all take one side to say that there was a discussion of this area, and the current attorney general, who`s under fire, takes the other side?

SNOW: Well, what...

MATTHEWS: You said everyone has to make their own conclusions, but it seems to me that people are concluding that this attorney general is not coming clean with us.

SNOW: No, I -- what I`m telling you is that the attorney general cannot give full answers to some of those questions, and furthermore, that what he`s saying is not necessarily in contradiction to what those other individuals were saying.

Again, a good follow-up would be: Why didn't Abu Al say he would be willing to discuss the matter in a closed session?