A recent Pew poll found that nearly 80 percent of Americans don’t trust the federal government and have little faith that it can solve the country’s problems, thus marking public confidence in the government at one of the lowest points in half a century. Last night on Fox News, host Greta Van Susteren asked former Bush administration White House Press Secretary Dana Perino about the poll. Perino, herself a former federal government employee, wondered what the other 20 percent of Americans polled in the Pew survey know that “the rest of us” do not:

PERINO: Well, I think it’s interesting that the 80 percent of the American people said they didn’t trust the government, and it sort of made me think, what do the other 20 percent know that the rest of us don’t know? Not a good number.

Watch it:

Perino later speculated that the massive discontent could be because of the rising deficits, which she said “this year alone higher than the last four years of the Bush administration combined.” She neglected to mention that her former boss is responsible for most of it.

NPR Senior News Analyst Cokie Roberts recently moderated a panel discussion with women serving in the U.S. Senate “about how they differ from their male counterparts.” Specifically, Roberts asked the senators — including Texas Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison and New York Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand — about why there are fewer scandalous affairs involving women in public life:

Q: So is Sen. Hutchison right? Are women more focused on their jobs — at least the women politicians you’ve covered?

ROBERTS: Let’s put it this way, we don’t see a lot of scandals among women. And her [Hutchison's] point — oh my lord, you try to keep the kids straight and the job straight, and get back and forth between houses. And of course, she is a Republican woman from Texas, who —

She actually, interesting Michelle — as a senator, and now she is in her mid- to late-60s, adopted two little children, who are really young enough to be her grandchildren. So this was a new balancing act for her to have these children.

But she was echoed by Kirsten Gillibrand, the young senator from New York, who has an 18-month-old baby and others. And Sen. Gillibrand says, “You’re in the middle of diapers and bottles and bills and votes and markups, how could you possibly think about doing anything else?” They’re joking on the one hand, but on the other hand they’re not. They take care of their families and take care of business.

Roberts also commented on Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace’s recent comments that he was hoping former Alaska governor — and fellow Fox News contributor — Sarah Palin would sit on his lap during their interview on his show. Roberts said his remarks were “appalling.” “You know, it’s the last place that men feel that they can just make jokes,” she said. “They would never make such jokes about a minority, you’d be in terrible trouble. But you can still make sexist jokes about women and get away with it.” Listen here:

In reaction to South Carolina Mark Sanford’s (R) extramarital affair last year, former Bush press secretary Dana Perino said the answer was to “[e]lect more women. No woman I know has the time for such trysts, nor do I know any who say the desire one. They’re too busy trying to keep all the plates spinning at home, at work, and at the gym to make sure none fall and break.”

Despite the backlash from prominent conservative lawyers against Liz Cheney and Keep America Safe’s “al Qaeda 7″ ad that questions the loyalty of Justice Department lawyers who worked on behalf of detainees, some on the right have risen to Cheney’s defense. On Monday, torture advocate Marc Thiessen dedicated his new Washington Post column to defending the ad, saying that Cheney asked “legitimate questions about Obama administration lawyers who defended America’s terrorist enemies.” Keep America Safe subsequently referred reporters to Thiessen’s column when asked to comment on the conservative criticism.

Today, Thiessen is up with another defense of the Cheney-led attacks, writing on the Washington Post’s PostPartisan blog that defenders of the Justice Department lawyers are wrong to invoke John Adams’ defense of British soldiers after the Boston massacre:

Defenders of the habeas lawyers representing al-Qaeda terrorists have invoked the iconic name of John Adams to justify their actions, claiming these lawyers are only doing the same thing Adams did when he defended British soldiers accused in the Boston Massacre. The analogy is clever, but wholly inaccurate.

For starters, Adams was a British subject at the time he took up their representation. The Declaration of Independence had not yet been signed, and there was no United States of America. The British soldiers were Adams’ fellow countrymen — not foreign enemies of the state at war with his country.

Thiessen’s argument that Adams was defending “fellow countrymen” and “not foreign enemies” is clever, but it’s undermined by the fact that some of the lawyers Thiessen and the ad impugn did work on behalf of American citizens. In a National Review blog post promoting his PostPartisan column, Thiessen directly attacks a lawyer who advocated on behalf of a detained American citizen:

Eric Holder vs. John Adams [Marc Thiessen]

I have a piece up for the Washington Post explaining why the al-Qaeda lawyers are wrong to wrap themselves in the mantle of John Adams. Thanks to the spade work of Bill Burck and Dana Perino, we now know why Holder was stonewalling on the identities of the “Al Qaeda 7” — he was one of them! If Holder and co. are simply carrying on the traditions of John Adams, why were they hiding their roles in seeking the release of enemy combatants? If they are proud of their work, why don’t they stand up and say so?

Yesterday, Perino and Burck published an article on National Review Online detailing how Holder contributed to, but neglected to tell the Senate about, an amicus brief to the Supreme Court supporting Jose Padilla, an American citizen who was held as an enemy combatant. Another one of the lawyers smeared by the ad, Joseph Guerra, now Principal Deputy Associate Attorney General, worked on a brief urging that the Supreme Court hear Padilla’s case. Another DoJ lawyer, Assistant Attorney General Tony West, worked on the case of “American Taliban” Johh Walker Lindh, an American citizen.

The discrepancy between Thiessen’s PostPartisan argument and the facts is indicative of his arguments in general. In discussing another one of Thiessen’s inconsistent arguments, Time’s Michael Scherer — who considers Thiessen’s vocal crusade to defend the Bush administration’s torture policies “a good thing” — remarked that he was “disappointed with the quality of Thiessen’s arguments, which seem to be designed more for cable news soundbites than for serious discussion.”

Last night on Fox News, former Bush White House press secretary Dana Perino criticized President Obama because he hasn’t held a “primetime” press conference since last July. “I don’t think that there’s any way…I would have gotten away with that with the White House press corps,” she complained.

Host Greta Van Susteren noted that last year, Obama actually conducted more one-on-one interviews that Bush or President Clinton had combined in the same time frame. But seeming to look for another line of attack, Perino pointed to a video the White House put out yesterday on the Travel Promotion Act and suggested that it indicated the administration is “repressive”:

PERINO: But there was an incident today where the President signed the Travel Promotion Act — not a huge bill by any stretch of the imagination. But usually, that is something that the White House press corps would get to cover. They didn’t today. And then later on in the day, the White House decided through its own media — they have a robust new media shop and they’re creating their own news and they’re posting it, and all the networks said that they’re not going to show it. But creating your own news is something that happens in repressive regimes. And a democracy is — it is critical to have a good, strong free press in a democracy.

Watch it:

Transparently posting news videos on the White House website is one thing; secretly producing “fake news” videos promoting an agenda and distributing them for local news broadcasts is quite another, which is exactly what the Bush administration did:

Under the Bush administration, the federal government has aggressively used a well-established tool of public relations: the prepackaged, ready-to-serve news report that major corporations have long distributed to TV stations to pitch everything from headache remedies to auto insurance. In all, at least 20 federal agencies, including the Defense Department and the Census Bureau, have made and distributed hundreds of television news segments in the past four years, records and interviews show. Many were subsequently broadcast on local stations across the country without any acknowledgement of the government’s role in their production.

In fact, the Government Accountability Office found that the Bush administration practice amounted to illegal “covert propaganda” — a ruling the Bush White House subsequently disregarded. The Bush team also famously paid conservative commentator Armstrong Williams to promote No Child Left Behind “on his nationally syndicated television show and to urge other black journalists to do the same.” The propaganda also spread abroad as well. The Bush Pentagon got caught planting positive coverage in Iraqi newspapers during the height of the insurgency.

Summing up “the heart of the Bush presidency,” journalist Ron Suskind reported that a senior Bush official once criticized him for living in “the reality-based community” after Suskind had written a piece critical of the administration. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” the official said. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”

By Perino’s standard, it seems the Bush administration constitutes a “repressive regime.”

Last night on Fox News, host Sean Hannity whined — as he usually does — about how the Obama administration doesn’t use the term “war on terror” (which is actually a good thing). Former Bush administration spokesperson and current Fox analyst Dana Perino joined in, complaining that no one is calling the massacre at Ft. Hood a terrorist attack. She then made this astonishing statement:

PERINO: And we had a terrorist attack on our country. And we should call it what it is. Because we need to face up to it so that we can prevent it from happening again.

HANNITY: I agree with you. And why won’t they say what you just so simply said?

PERINO: They want to do all of their investigations. I don’t know. All of the thinking that goes into it. But we did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush’s term. I hope they’re not looking at this politically. I do think we ought it to the American people to call it what it is.

Watch it:

Of course, the terror attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center occurred on Sept. 11, 2001 — eight months into President Bush’s first term. But also, conservatives like to claim that the Bush administration prevented any terror incidents in the U.S. since 9/11. But they conveniently forget the anthrax attacks on U.S. news organizations and members of Congress over the course of several weeks beginning on Sept. 18, 2001.