Holy Jesus!

[richlevy]

From here:

How close was Haggard to the White House?
Tim Grieve of Salon talk to Lauren Sandler, the author of "Righteous: Dispatches From the Evangelical Youth Movement," who reports: "Haggard participates -- or at least he did -- in weekly White House conference calls, and he and the president like to joke that the only thing they disagree on is what truck to drive."

..and where to get top quality illegal drugs.


From here.

In case you were wondering, yesterday the White House trotted out traveling press aide Tony Fratto to field questions about Ted Haggard. Here's the exchange:

Q This Reverend Haggard out in Colorado, is he someone who is close to the White House? There had been reports that he was on the weekly call with evangelicals. Is that true?

MR. FRATTO: I'm actually told that that's not true, that he has -- in terms of a weekly call that he has? He had been on a couple of calls, but was not a weekly participant in those calls. I believe he's been to the White House one or two times. I don't want to confine it to a specific number because it would take a while to figure out how many times. But there have been a lot of people who come to the White House, and --

Q -- when was he at the White House?

MR. FRATTO: I couldn't tell you specifically. I know that there was a picture of him with the President in one of the TV reports, so obviously he met with the President at some point in time.

And so Rev. Haggard joins a growing list of people, like Jack Abramoff, who have been to the White House, but who, according to the White House, haven't really been to the White House. Not in any..er..strict definition of the word been.

Watching the White House try to define the word 'visit' is almost as much fun as watching Clinton try to define the word 'sex'. And if 10 minutes after the scandal broke, Josh Bolten and Karl Rove didn't have an exact list of the dates of each of Haggard's visits, I'd be personally shocked.