Dana Milbank fact checks the ‘PDB’ GOPropoganda lie

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Dana Milbank of the Washington Post fact-checks another GOPropoganda lie that started with a column written by the Washingon Post's Marc Thiessen, a former speech writer for George W. Bush. Romney and his bucket brigade:

As Romney has pursued his kitchen-sink strategy this week, he and his party have pivoted from the economy, where Obama is most vulnerable, to national security, where Obama is strongest. The outcome has been a series of dubious attacks.

On Monday, Romney tried to blame the president for scheduled defense-spending cuts put in place by the bipartisan debt deal reached last year. The idea “emanated from the White House, and it will result in the loss of thousands and thousands and hundreds of thousands of jobs,” he said. Evidently, Romney didn’t consider that this attack contradicted his previous claim that private-sector investment, not big government spending, creates jobs.

About the same time, the Republican National Committee and prominent Republicans such as Dick Cheney and John McCain threw another faulty bit of plumbing at Obama: that the president “does not attend his daily intelligence meeting” more than half the time, in contrast to George W. Bush, who “almost never missed his daily intelligence meeting.” This claim was the work of former Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen, who writes a weekly online column for The Washington Post.

In reality, Obama didn’t “attend” these meetings, because there were no meetings to attend: The oral briefings had been mostly replaced by daily exchanges in which Obama reads the materials and poses written questions and comments to intelligence officials. This is how it was done in the Clinton administration, before Bush decided he would prefer to read less. Bush’s results — Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, and the failure to find Osama bin Laden — suggest this was not an obvious improvement.

So it is a fiction entirely made up out of whole cloth. But the right-wing noise machine, including our own embarrassment from Arizona, Sen. John McCain, has perpetuated this GOPropganda lie.

UPDATE: Steve Benen has more, The bogus 'intelligence briefings' talking point:

The truth, as Thiessen probably realizes, isn't controversial at all. In
reality, Obama received a detailed, written intelligence briefing
yesterday, just as he does literally every day, which contained pressing
national security information. Most of the time, Obama also receives an
in-person briefing in the White House, though as Thiessen probably
realizes, many of the president's national security meetings are never put on his public schedule (Jonathan Capehart):

The weakness in Thiessen’s question, which comes from data gathered by a
conservative research organization, is that it relies on Obama’s public
schedule. The president reads the daily intelligence briefing every
day. That he doesn’t meet with his national security staff to discuss it
isn’t earth shattering when you know that many of the president’s
national security meetings are never put on his public schedule.

“I’d note that these are hardly the only national security meetings he
has each week that include an intelligence briefing,” National Security
Council spokesman Tommy Vietor told me via e-mail this morning.

* * *

“[T]he president is among the most sophisticated consumers of
intelligence on the planet,” Vietor told me. “He receives and reads his
PDB every day, and most days when he’s at the White House receives a
briefing in person. When necessary he probes the arguments, requests
more information or seeks alternate analysis. Sometimes that’s via a
written assessment and other times it’s in person.”