From yet another brilliant White House Briefing column by the Washington Post's Dan Froomkin (subscribe already!) comes this dissection of yet another ridiculous briefing with press secretary Scott McClellan.

Eric Brewer, who's so new to the White House press corps he hasn't figured out he's not supposed to ask a real question, poses a real question: "Have the massive intelligence failures documented in the [recent WMD] report caused the President to rethink his policy of preventive war?"

Think about what our cynical friend Frank Luntz says - how mentioning September 11th is a "trick" that works to this administration's advantage - as Froomkin documents McClellan's responses, brilliantly using Google to point out how often McClellan goes back to the well for the same Luntz-inspired non-answers.

Here's what McClellan said, from the transcript. You can click on each phrase to see how many times he's used those same words before in previous briefings.

"You know, September 11th taught us a very important lesson, and that lesson was that we must confront threats before it is too late. If we had known of those attacks ahead of time, we would have moved heaven and earth to prevent them from happening. This President will not hesitate when it comes to protecting the American people. And in the post-September 11th world that we live in, the consequences of underestimating the threat we face is too high. It's tens of -- possibly tens of thousands of lives.

Brewer followed up: "What about the cost of overestimating?"

McClellan: "Are you talking about the Iraq situation?"

Brewer: "Going into Iraq, yes, with bad intelligence."

McClellan: I think we've talked about this before.The world is safer with Saddam Hussein's regime removed from power. The Iraqi people are serving as an example to the rest of the Middle East through their courage and determination to build a free future."

And at this point, Hearst columnist Helen Thomas piped in:

"The ones that are alive, you mean?"

Classic Helen. Makes me proud to have the last name Thomas.

A lot of people think that McClellan is a terrible press secretary because he never answers a question, just sticks to the talking points, the stock phrases. There's no art to his misinformation, the way that there was with, say, Ari Fleischer, whose back-and-forths with the likes of Helen Thomas were so entertaining they inspired this found poem by Hart Seely. (Hey -you can't spell "liar" with "A-R-I," said Middlebury '91 to Middlebury '82).

But I argue that McClellan is exactly what this administration needs: a broken record who nervously smiles and unsmiles through every unanswer with the same intonation, no matter the subject - be it the deficit or dead Iraqi children, same, same, same, and never a real answer. And still conflating September 11th and Saddam Hussein, even while discussing a 600-page report objectively pointing out how "dead wrong" they were to do so. Invoking September 11th per Mr. Luntz's recommendations.

Sigh.

I don't know if it's incompetence or if it's calculated, but either way it serves this White House very, very well.

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