Apologies up front for the tardiness, but we're still catching up on web reading after being on the road.

Dan Froomkin's White House Briefing column yesterday contains one of rarest of D.C. gems: A head-on assault against the pointlessness of interacting with the administration's spin machine.

He dissects one of Scott McClellan's answers in a press briefing last week by linking to Google searches showing how many times the press secretary has used that exact phrase before. The result? Wonk hilarity.

It also leads one emailer to write, "Why don't they just replace McClellan with a piece of wood with buttons that when pushed give the same tired, insane answers? They have the technology right now to do this. The DoD could probably even put the buttons on some type of life-like mannequin."

At least then reporters could be sure they were tweaking the White House by pushing its buttons...