Podium that broke over a bar exam now offered to UFC boss told to bring fighters as aides.

…(cont) Fourth of October — I wrote the date down — the White House hired a new assistant press secretary. Days earlier she'd been covering the president for a right-wing outlet; the story that ran about her hiring was about a photograph, her holding a rifle in a T-shirt with a word on it I won't repeat at the bar. The White House defended her. That's the hiring story. I went through my own paper after that — the glovebox, the shoebox under the seat, every place I keep things I don't want my wife asking about — looking for the story where she left. Didn't find one. Maybe it's filed somewhere I haven't opened yet. Does the record in front of you show one?

Next day, the fifth: the woman who'd held the job before all this — youngest press secretary in that administration's history — announced she was joining a television network. She'd left the White House earlier in the year, after her second child was born. Is that the same shape of ending as what I just described, or a different one?

Ninth of October, a new press secretary is sworn in with one job: get the briefings running again, because the room had been dark. One of those questions is where she passed the bar exam. Her answer, on the record, is "when I moved to China." Is that a jurisdiction you've heard of? Three days later, the sixteenth, she's gone. Five days, start to finish — a shorter run than most warranties on a fan belt.

How many of them got a clean goodbye story, like the one on the fifth? How many got a firing story, like the one on the sixteenth? And how many got neither, so far as the record in front of you shows?

Now, this weekend, the president has offered that same podium to the chief executive of a fighting organization, and told him, in the same post, to bring some of his own fighters along as aides. The Hill's account has him naming several of those fighters. The Times account has him telling Mr. White to bring fighters along, full stop, no names attached. So I don't actually know which fighters. Do you, from what you've got in front of you?

A smart operation would have read page nine before it wrote page one. I don't run an operation. I run a Dodge with two hundred thousand miles on it, and I notice things slowly, which might be why I noticed this one.

Oh — hold on, one more thing, because I almost walked out without it. The post announcing the offer doesn't call Mr. White a communicator, or a spokesman, or anything along those lines. The president's own words for him are "a violent Fighter and Warrior." Is that the line that goes on a résumé for standing at a podium and taking questions from reporters, or is that a different résumé?