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Hell hath no fury like a blogger scorned.

Former White House aide Dan Bartlett has drawn a MediaLand of attention for an interview he did with Texas Monthly, disputing the notion that the media wasn’t aggressive enough with pre-war reporting.

White House correspondents have been tagged, unfairly, with not being tough enough on the administration and President Bush in the run-up to the war. If you go back and look, they asked all the right questions. The problem is, they’re acting now like they have to be five times more critical, and I think they’ve gone overboard.

But what really caught this writer’s eye was Bartlett’s characterization of conservative bloggers:

I mean, talk about a direct IV into the vein of your support. It’s a very efficient way to communicate. They regurgitate exactly and put up on their blogs what you said to them. It is something that we’ve cultivated and have really tried to put quite a bit of focus on.

"Regurgitate?" Really? Coming from a former Bush aide? Oh no he din’t. That’s basically the equivalent of calling White House reporters ‘stenographers.’ (And we've learned you don’t go there.)

I figured that this wouldn’t sit well with right-wing bloggers. But I wasn’t quite sure. So I pulled a Captain Renault and e-mailed some "usual suspects.”

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For the past week, news outlets have been awash in talk of Bush's upcoming speech on his Iraq strategy. That cycle has been fueled, of course, by leaks from the White House about what the speech will actually contain. By now, the official previews of the speech have emerged – including a morning preview at the White House for network anchors and White House counselor Dan Bartlett's appearances on television discussing the speech. His remarks are effectively dominating the news right now.

All of this is typical of what happens before a major presidential speech, but it begs the question of what, exactly, the White House's strategy is in showing its hand early. Why do they explain what's going to be in the speech before the president gives it? The reasons, unsurprisingly, have a lot to do with controlling the way the speech is received.

"Basically I think there is a point like today at which [the previews] become a practical courtesy," said White House correspondent Bill Plante. "But the leaks over the last week were to enlist allies and to give maximum exposure to the ideas while perhaps holding back specifics. And by those yardsticks it's received great success -- we've been talking about nothing else for a week now."

Official appearances like Bartlett's allow the administration to respond to information that's been widely consumed for the past week, said Plante, which offers "another news cycle to consider the speech."

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