Sometimes, these guys make it too easy. White House Press Secretary Tony Snow, yesterday, in his final appearance:

“No, benchmarks were something that Congress wanted to use as a metric. And we’re going to produce a report. But the fact is that the situation is bigger and more complex, and you need to look at the whole picture.”

Reality, as reported last week:

It was the White House and the Iraqi government, not Congress, that first proposed the benchmarks for Iraq that are now producing failing grades, a provenance that raises questions about why the administration is declaring now that the government’s performance is not the best measure of change.

The administration presented a to-do list and said, “Judge us in September on these points.” They’ve successfully completed three of the 18 tasks. In response, the new line is, “To-do lists are stupid.”