If White House spokesman Scott “The Lyin’ King” McClellan is not the most consistently slippery little varmint ever to roam the halls of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, I don't know who is. Here's excerpts from Friday's White House press briefing when reporters, like children at a county fair trying to catch the greased pig, attempt to get McClellan to answer questions about George W. Bush himself leaking intelligence information:

Q: Did the President know that Joe Wilson was married to a CIA agent before Novak revealed it?

McClellan: Again, this goes to -- go back and look at previous comments, but this goes to an ongoing legal proceeding, and I would encourage you --

Q: Did he know? It's a simple question.

McClellan: -- I would encourage you to go and look at the filing that was made just the other night, because Mr. Fitzgerald touches on that subject in the filing.

Q: You mean the President did not know?

McClellan: Helen, I can't get into discussing an ongoing legal proceeding, and that's a question relating to the ongoing legal proceeding.

Q: I think it's a very simple, important question.

McClellan: Matt, did you have something?

Q: Yes, your refusal to comment on this on the grounds of it being an ongoing legal proceeding --

McClellan: Let me -- let me -- hang on, hang on --

Q: -- that leads to the conclusion that --

McClellan: Hang on.

Q: All right.

McClellan: Hang on. Let me just say why and remind people why. There is an ongoing legal proceeding underway that is headed toward trial. We want to see a fair trial. We want to see due process. We don't want to do anything that could compromise this ongoing legal proceeding or compromise or jeopardize the trial. And that has been our policy with other matters, as well. And so this has been a policy that has been well established for a long time.

Now, to your question.

Q: This inevitably leads to the conclusion that you are not disputing the allegation that the President was involved in the leaking -- or authorized the leaking of classified information. Are you satisfied with that? And is that really in the interests of the American people?

McClellan: I'm not getting into confirming or denying things, because I'm not commenting at all on matters relating to an ongoing legal proceeding.

Q: Scott, just a --

McClellan: Let me come back to you. Elaine, go ahead.

Q: Scott, let me ask you about the issue of credibility. Isn't the fact that you're up here having to vigorously defend and make the distinction between what some people see as leaking and what you are saying, from what I understand, is the sharing of information to provide historical context -- isn't that illustrative of the fact that the President's credibility has been damaged by it?

McClellan: The Democrats have a credibility problem when they try to suggest that we were manipulating intelligence, or that this is about something other than what I just said. That's crass politics. And they're the ones who have an issue when it comes to what you bring up.

Go ahead.

Q: I want to see if I can sort out what you described earlier as sort of "talking past" each other earlier. There's a process for declassification, and the President has declassification authority.

McClellan: That's correct.

Q: When the President determines that classified information can be made public without jeopardizing sources and methods, that it's an appropriate thing to do, is that -- can that supplant the declassification process? Is that, in effect, an immediate act? Is it de facto declassified by that determination --

McClellan: The President can declassify information if he chooses.

Q: So if a declassification --

McClellan: It's inherent in our Constitution. He is the head of the executive branch.

Q: Is it possible, then, for a declassification process to be underway, or perhaps not yet even started, but perhaps in the middle of it, the President can say, this is declassified and -- or this is something that is worthy of the American people seeing, and they can happen on separate tracks?

McClellan: I want to be careful here, because that is touching on something that is brought up in the legal proceedings. So --

Q: Well, it's a question more about administrative policy and how the White House would handle it.

McClellan: -- but the President is authorized to declassify information as he chooses.

Q: Right, so just one other question, if I can. You've already taken a couple of shots at Democrats, but the Minority Leader this morning has gone to the Senate floor and demanded a whole series of questions to be answered. At one point, he says that only the President can answer the question as to whether or not the buck stops in the Oval Office or the leaks start, and has suggested that what he is now seeing -- Harry Reid, the Minority Leader -- in his opinion, it speaks to a pattern of misleading America by the Bush White House. It raises somber and troubling questions about the Bush administration's candor with Congress and the American people.

This does seem to be yet another example of the Democrat's ability to criticize the President for not coming clean on all of this. How would --

McClellan: That is exactly --

Q: Hold on.

McClellan: Okay, go ahead.

Q: How would you explain to the nation the President's assertion that anybody who leaks information would be prosecuted, when they are now -- the Democrats now see that the President --

McClellan: Leaking classified information.

Q: Right.

McClellan: There's a distinction here. That is the kind of crass politics that I am referring to. Democrat leaders, like the one you brought up, are refusing to acknowledge an important distinction here. First of all, the national intelligence information was declassified information that was provided to the American people.

Now the other issue I brought up was the issue of the terrorist surveillance program. You bet the President has spoken out about its unauthorized disclosure, because what its disclosure has done is shown al Qaeda, our enemy, the play book. This is an enemy that watches us very closely. This is an enemy that adapts and adjusts when they learn information about our tactics. And it's important -- it's important, as we carry out this war on terrorism, that we don't do anything that could compromise our nation's security.

The terrorist surveillance program has been a vital tool that has helped to save American lives. And it's one tool, in an overall arsenal of tools, that we are using to take the fight to the enemy and stop attacks from happening on American soil.

Q: But I just want to make sure I understand. In effect, your answer to the Harry Reid criticism is that the President has the authority to declassify. Therefore, the discussion of leak is inappropriate.

McClellan: My response to what he said is that that's just crass politics, because he is not acknowledging an important distinction. And the distinction is that, one, the information that he was referring to was declassified. And the other information he's trying to twist and put into that is a separate matter. These are two separate issues.

Just for the record, in the course of a 54-minute briefing, Weasel Boy used the phrase “ongoing legal proceeding” 17 times.

Wouldn’t it be easier to be the mouthpiece for an administration that could manage to avoid chronically being part of legal proceedings? Now there’s a concept.

You can reach Bob Geiger at geiger.bob@gmail.com