Guess it’s hard after three and a half years working as the chief Ministry of Truth communicator for the White House to get out of fibbing mode [1]:
White House press secretary Jay Carney says he never lied to the press corps during his three and a half years as the top presidential spokesman.
“Honestly, it’s not because I’m a paragon of virtue, it’s because that would be a terrible way to do the job,” Carney told reporters at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast.
The press secretary admitted that he sometimes could not or did not want to answer questions posed by reporters.
“What you do when you can’t say is you don’t,” Carney said. “You take the question or you explain what you can.”
Carney will leave his post as press secretary on Friday. His deputy, Josh Earnest, is slated to take over his position.
Opponents of the administration have accused the longtime press secretary of occasionally playing fast and loose with the truth. House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) blasted him last summer as a “paid liar” for his explanation of the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of conservative political groups.
Lying would be a “terrible way to do the job”? When did he have this epiphany? Certainly not before Wednesday [2], that’s for sure [3]. Since he’s lying now about, well, his years of lying, it would seem he’s still working out the particulars of how doing so is a “terrible way to do the job.” Good luck with the deprogramming, Jay.