Wonkette

But he did have what sounds like a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. Here’s what actually happened with respect to yesterday’s White House pool report, from Mr. Lewis himself (whose email we reprint with his permission): MORE »

[Update: Please see this correction/clarification.]

Look, we’re the last people to call someone out for oversleeping — we do it all the time. The number of times we hit the “snooze” button sometimes reaches the double digits.

But we’re not White House pool reporters. And we weren’t AWOL on one of the biggest news mornings in recent memory (even if our servers might have been, temporarily).

Check it out:

From: White House Press Releases
Sent: Wednesday, April 19, 2006 12:03 PM
Subject: POOL REPORT #1, 4/19/06

POOL REPORT #1

April 19, 2006

It was a morning of massive systems failures.

Failure number one: In an attempt to shed its reputation as a crack news gathering machine, the Copley News Service managed to screw up its pool duty. The details are too trivial and boring to recite here but the curious may call and I will sheepishly supply. That there is any pool report at all is entirely due to the gracious and patient help of Reuters’ crack WH staff, Patty Wilson in particular.

So pool reporter Finlay Lewis implies that he didn’t oversleep — but he doesn’t outright deny it either. He seems to be suggesting that, well, he just kinda forgot that he was on today (”managed to screw up its pool duty”). Not sure if that’s much better.

Shit — what a day for forgetfulness! You miss one little morning of pool reporting, and the new chief of staff goes and shakes everything up on you. Life is so unfair!

The full mea culpa appears after the jump. (We won’t mock Lewis too much, since he does quite a bit himself.)

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