Is this a guy you can respect?

From: washingtonpost.com "White House Briefing" Daily Blog - Dan Froomkin:

...Bush stopping by the briefing room yesterday not to answer (or even be asked) a single substantive question -- but to insult pretty much everyone in spitting distance.

Here's the transcript ; here's the video .

Spotting Marlin Fitzwater among the visiting luminaries, the president razzed his father's notoriously homely press secretary: "Marlin, you're looking as pretty as ever."

Tweaking his own press secretary, Tony Snow, Bush said "I want to thank the former spin meisters for joining me up here. Tell my people how to do it, will you?"

When Cox Newspaper reporter Ken Herman responded with a quip to Bush's question about how long the renovation was expected to take -- "We're setting no timetables, Mr. President," Herman said -- Bush responded by calling him a "crackpot." All in good fun, of course.

"It looks a little crowded in here. And so you want to double the size?" Bush taunted the audience. "Forget it."

He needled the television personalities in the audience: "The last time I had a press conference in here, it felt like it was outside. As a matter of fact, some of your makeup was running."

Asked a sycophantic question about the press corps itself -- by chief briefing-room bootlicker Raghubir Goyal, who represents an Indian newspaper I'm not even sure really exists -- Bush responded sarcastically: "It's a beautiful bunch of people."

And when former ABC White House correspondent Sam Donaldson, famous for shouting out important questions to Ronald Reagan, asked Bush an idiotic one -- "Mr. President, should Mel Gibson be forgiven?" -- Bush responded: "Is that Sam Donaldson? Forget it. You're a has-been. We don't have to answer has-been's questions."

Even a press corps used to chuckling and guffawing at Bush's frat-boy towel-snapping responded with what the White House transcribers recorded as an "Ohhhhh!" over that one.

All in all, an appropriately ugly and useless sendoff to a room where both respect and self-respect have been in short supply.

Later in the post...

Friedman also castigates Tony Snow for his treatment of Helen Thomas at the July 18 press briefing .

"She pointed out, correctly, that the U.S. was perceived to have endorsed 'collective punishment,' against Lebanon and Palestine. His reply: 'Well thank you for the Hezbollah view.'" Friedman writes.

"Not since the Vietnam war when an American official asked the press, 'Which side are you on,' have I heard a presidential flack insult an impugn a reporter's integrity for asking a legitimate question. Never in my dozen or so years asking tough questions of Larry Speakes, Marlin Fitzwater, Mike McCurry and even Ron Ziegler during Watergate, did I hear such a snide insult."