Let's play "What did the president know and when did he know it?"

... for the gazillionth time this year, and it's only March.
Wouldn't want to be Tony Snow. The press is just so mean, wanting to know stuff, pointing out obvious holes in a story before Karl Rove even has a chance to set it straight, off-record and unsworn in, if the Congress accepts what one saucy correspondent called the White House's E.G.O. (for "extraordinarily generous offer.") Yes, they were all pretty cheeky today.

from today's White House Press Corps briefing:.

ED HENRY, CNN: Earlier, you were saying, when I asked about, "Well, was the president informed of this decision; did the president sign off on the U.S. attorneys being fired?," you said the president has no recollection of being informed of all of this.

SNOW: Right.

HENRY: So were his advisers really advising him on this, or is this really privileged communication involving the president and his advisers, if the president wasn't looped in, you're saying, on this decision?

SNOW: Well, that's...

HENRY: So, other people...

SNOW: That also falls into the intriguing question category.

HENRY: But, I mean...

SNOW: You're asking me to -- look, there are a number of complex legal considerations in here, and I'm not going to try to play junior lawyer. These are the sort of things that people are going to have an opportunity to talk about.

HENRY: But you can't have it both ways, if you're saying the president wasn't in the loop, when he just cited executive privilege for the president's...

SNOW: No, what you are saying is, "Are conversations that didn't take place privileged?"

Well, no, they didn't take place.

HENRY: So what are you protecting?

SNOW: Well, no, we're not -- what we're trying to do is to protect the ability of the American people to see folks in Washington get at the truth without, in fact, engaging in the kind of unseemly partisanship that has too often been a factor in recent political life.