More Thursday Dana Perino Propaganda

She’s getting a little more clever anymore as opposed to merely telling outright lies, I have to admit (from here)…

Q Earlier in the administration, the President opposed stricter CAFE standards on lighter fuel -- lighter vehicles --

MS. PERINO: Oh, really? When?

Q It was I believe about four or five years ago.

MS. PERINO: I believe not, because I was here, I worked as the communications director for the Council on Environmental Quality, and he has long championed -- and he was the first to increase CAFE standards for SUVs and light trucks for the first time in a decade.

Q Well, wasn't the basis on less, smaller fuel-efficient cars weren't as safe as SUVs and --

MS. PERINO: There was a National Academy of Sciences report that said that, yes. And when you are working on CAFE standards, one of the things that you take into account is the safety of the vehicles. And I don't think anybody in this room would suggest that we shouldn't do that.

Perino is actually right about Dubya favoring raising vehicle mileage standards for SUVs and light trucks, as Media Matters notes here (though environmentalists claim that the new standards are too modest), but His Fraudulency fought raising mileage standards for passenger cars for years – that is, until the Republican 109th Congress came up with “a proposal…to grant the executive branch authority to set fuel-efficiency standards for cars -- a power that (until then resided) with Congress” in April 2006.

For the life of me, I cannot imagine why Bushco would care about having that authority, unless Dubya wanted to use it as a cudgel against the automakers and the UAW by raising standards so high that they wouldn’t be able to compete and lose market share, political clout, etc. (the UAW is a decidedly Democratic-favoring constituency, though the “Big Three” execs aren’t so easily categorized, I know).

And by the way (as noted here), the National Academy of Sciences study that Perino cites from 2001 called for raising the mileage standards at a higher rate than proposed by Bushco and also for closing the “light truck loophole” that allows SUVs to adhere to the same mileage standard as trucks, even though SUVs are used like passenger cars (the loophole in the law was created at a time when SUVs were only about 20 percent of the vehicles on the road, though that number was closer to 50 percent at the time of the study and is probably comparable to that now, in spite of our economy).

Also…

Q Dana, can I follow? At the risk of -- you said we'll see what Congress puts forward on an unemployment extension if they come back. It seems to me in the past, you opposed that, saying that it encourages people to stay out of work longer.

MS. PERINO: What we have said is that -- well, if you just look at the statistics, the historical data, that as soon as that last week comes about, that's -- it's like a hockey stick and people's employment goes up. But it doesn't mean that we're not mindful of the fact that -- how distressed some people are because we realize how high unemployment is, how tough the economy is, and how it's taken a while to get people back to work. And so, we'll just see if Congress comes back with anything.

I don’t know where the hell Perino is getting that “hockey stick” reference from, but I would say that this states pretty clearly what she and Bushco in general think of the unemployed.

And finally, another Think Progress link tells us of more recent evasions by Perino on the matter of stem-cell research (thus allowing these folks to “beat us to the punch”; not attacking the Indian researchers, but bemoaning Bushco stupidity yet again).