Ladies and gentlemen, this is the professionalism of the White House staff:

Spicer had wanted to drop the bombshell news in an emailed statement but it was not transmitting quickly enough, so he ended up standing in the doorway of the press office around 5:40 p.m. and shouting a statement to reporters who happened to be gathered in the briefing room. He then vanished, with his staff locking the door leading to his office. The press staff said that Spicer might do a briefing, then announced that he definitely wouldn’t say anything more that night. But as Democrats and Republicans began to criticize and question the firing with increasing levels of alarm, Spicer and two prominent spokeswomen were suddenly speed-walking up the White House drive to defend the president on CNN, Fox News and Fox Business.

They ended up doing brief interviews from the White House grounds, then hid behind a hedge to confer some more.

I didn’t know that there were outdoor sets for television interviews on the grounds at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., but apparently so.

After Spicer spent several minutes hidden in the bushes behind these sets, Janet Montesi, an executive assistant in the press office, emerged and told reporters that Spicer would answer some questions, as long as he was not filmed doing so. Spicer then emerged.

“Just turn the lights off. Turn the lights off,” he ordered. “We’ll take care of this… Can you just turn that light off?”

Spicer got his wish and was soon standing in near darkness between two tall scrubs, with more than a dozen reporters closely gathered around him. For 10 minutes, he responded to a flurry of questions, vacillating between light-hearted asides and clear frustration with getting the same questions over and over again.

You know, it’s got to be really hard working for a bull-goose loony like Trump, so I’m inclined to sympathize with Spicer a little, but only a little. He can’t maintain a professional cool for very long, which is why Melissa McCarthy’s impersonation of him on SNL is so devastating.

I’d love to know if he maintained a straight face while he said this.

As Spicer tells it, Rosenstein was confirmed about two weeks ago and independently took on this issue so the president was not aware of the probe until he received a memo from Rosenstein on Tuesday, along with a letter from Attorney General Jeff Sessions recommending that Comey be fired.

Right. A respected US Attorney comes into his new job as Deputy AG of the United States and unilaterally decides with no instruction from his boss that he’ll look into the work the Director of the FBI has been doing.

Pull the other one, Spicey.